soil & fertility 13 people

Soil microbiome science

The laboratories working out which organisms are actually in a soil, what each of them does, and which of those functions a farmer can move.

Notes

For most of the history of soil biology the honest answer to “what is living in this handful” was that nobody knew, because most soil organisms will not grow on a plate. Sequencing removed that limit, and the work on this page is what followed.

The questions are now specific enough to be useful. Which taxa dominate soils worldwide, and how few of them account for most of the biomass. What root exudate chemistry does to community assembly. Whether a microbial trait inferred from a genome can predict how much carbon a rhizosphere will hold. What happens to a community under combined stressors rather than one at a time.

Most of this is upstream of anything a grower does this season, and it is the reason the practical advice on the other pages is getting less speculative each decade.

The ground they laid

Mary K. Firestone Foundationally mapped how photosynthate carbon flows from living roots into rhizosphere microbial communities. foundational work

Working now

Brajesh K. Singh Demonstrated that loss of soil biodiversity causes proportional loss of ecosystem function, and uses global microbiome data to predict climate impacts on crop and ecosystem resilience. active practice Colin Averill Applied human-microbiome-project methods and large-scale sequencing to map the forest microbiome and link fungal biodiversity to tree growth and carbon capture, then built a company to restore it. active practice Dietrich Epp Schmidt Bridges deep-soil microbiome data and DNA sequencing with applied regenerative agroforestry and ectomycorrhizal nursery practice. active practice Elizabeth M. Bach Tracks how soil food webs, aggregate stability, and carbon recover across decades of tallgrass prairie restoration. active practice Eoin Brodie Builds genome-informed, trait-based models that scale microscopic microbial traits up to predict soil carbon storage and greenhouse gas emissions. active practice Jane M. Lucas Shows how human stressors such as livestock antibiotics, warming, drought, and fungicides interact to alter soil microbial communities and nutrient cycling. active practice Jeanette Norton Tracks the functional genes of bacteria and archaea driving the agricultural nitrogen cycle, especially ammonia oxidation. active practice Jennifer Pett-Ridge Uses NanoSIMS imaging and stable isotope probing to visualize the plant-microbe-mineral interface at the nanoscale and show how persistent soil carbon forms. active practice Kelly Wrighton Decodes metabolic networks with genome-resolved metagenomics to determine what individual soil microbes actually do in agricultural and wetland systems. active practice Matthew Wallenstein Translated rhizosphere microbiome research into a commercial phosphorus-solubilizing microbial consortium (Mammoth P) and now leads soil health science at Syngenta. active practice Noah Fierer Senior author of the first global atlas of dominant soil bacteria, showing ~500 phylotypes (2% of taxa) make up nearly half of soil bacterial communities worldwide. active practice Thea Whitman Studies how fire-altered (pyrogenic) carbon and biochar interact with soil microbial communities to stabilize or prime soil carbon. active practice

Notes

The ground they laid

Working now

Sources for this record