🌲🔥🧬 New pre-print from Elliot Weiss in the Banfield Lab! We tested whether inoculating burned forest soils with native microbes could aid recovery. A single inoculation accelerated the return of symbiotic fungi and nitrogen cycling! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Microbial inoculation accelerates post-fire soil recovery in a mixed conifer forest

High-severity wildfires of increasing size and frequency result in release of carbon dioxide and loss of timber resources, reduction in biodiversity, loss of soil, diminished water quality, and reduce...

biorxiv.org

Excited to share a preprint from my postdoc research at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social in the @banfieldlab.bsky.social! We surveyed soil microbiomes for autotrophy - and found it nearly everywhere, but most abundant in deep, saturated soils. Check it out below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our recent publication where the central question was: in soils, are there trademark characteristics of rapidly transcribed genes? And it was a resounding “it depends”. We found gene function, environmental stimulus, and phylogeny all impacted this relationship. More here: peerj.com/articles/206...

Wetting dry soil rapidly stimulates microbial activity and has important consequences for biogeochemical cycling. In our paper out today, we show that part of that response can be explained by how bacterial genomes are written (i.e. codon usage, nucleotide freq., genome size) doi.org/10.1073/pnas...