Microbial life in soil: Signatures of niche adaptation and their application.

Soil is an archetypal complex system, with physical and chemical heterogeneity co-evolving with biology to create abundant metabolic and physiological niches for soil microorganisms to survive and thrive. Recognizing the genetic complexity of soil microbiomes, there is a need to derive generalizable principles regarding the drivers of microbial functional diversity in soil and their interactions with microbial traits. Deriving these principles and approaches to evaluate them is a necessary step towards building predictive models of soil microbiome activity and solutions that harness microbiome function. In this presentation I will discuss several advances in illuminating microbial functional traits in soil, a framework to incorporate this new knowledge into mechanistic models of soil biogeochemistry and some early applications in agroecosystems.

Eoin Brodie obtained his Ph.D. from University College Dublin in Ireland and joined Berkeley Lab following postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley Lab he is Deputy Director of the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division. His research focuses on the feedbacks between microorganisms and their natural environments, with a primary focus on soil and subsurface systems scaling from microbial mechanisms to ecosystem scale processes.