The rate at which plants photosynthesize, thereby capturing carbon from the atmosphere, is limited by a number of factors including the availability of nitrogen (N) in soil. Past research has presumed that plants exclusively use inorganic nitrogen (ammonium, nitrate) for growth. Current work suggests that plants may have access to additional types of nitrogen in...
Author: Rima Upchurch
ECM Conference paper out
In May 2018, the Zak lab (with financial support from the Beyond Carbon Neutral Seminar Series at SEAS) hosted a two-day symposium on ectomycorrhizal fungi and carbon storage, a rapidly developing research field in terrestrial ecosystem ecology. The goal for this was to gather researchers known for work on ECM and nutrient cycling together to...
Congrats to Wes!
Wes’s paper in Ecosphere, “Root endophytes and invasiveness: no difference between native and non‐native Phragmites in the Great Lakes Region” is now out online and can be found here. Congrats to him!
USGS Grant awarded
The Zak lab was recently awarded a USGS grant thru the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU). This grant, “Examining Phragmites’ microbiome for Potential Control Strategies”, will aid Wes Bickford (EEB PhD student) to further understand how the microbial communities of native and non-native phragmites interact to with their hosts and how that interaction affects establishment...
Welcome to Danielle and Etienne!
Today we added two new members to the Zak lab, Etienne Herrick and Danielle Boshers. Etienne will be working as a research assistant on our NSF grant, and her focus will be on the lab and molecular work for ECM fungal community related to that research. Danielle comes to us through USGS, where she will...
Zak lab awarded NSF Ecosystems Grant!
The Zak lab has recently been awarded an NSF DEB grant! The grant, titled “Ectomycorrhizal Fungi and the Enzymatic Liberation of Nitrogen from Soil Organic Matter: Ecosystem Processes and Underlying Molecular Mechanisms” (link here), will be studying the ECM and C-cycling on multiple fronts. Our goal is to understand more about the interaction of ECM...
Peter awarded two fellowships!
Peter Pellitier has been awarded two student fellowships due to his outstanding work as a graduate student. The Mycological Society of America awards only two Graduate Fellowships each year to promising students of mycology and are evaluated based on their classwork, research and promise as a future mycologist. The Integrated Training in Microbial Systems (ITiMS)...
Elizabeth with another paper out
Elizabeth Entwistle’s paper on how N-deposition alters expressed peroxidases, an enzyme critical to the lignin-degrading step during decomposition, is now online. The title is “Anthropogenic N Deposition Alters the Composition of Expressed Class II Fungal Peroxidases” and can be found at doi.org/10.1128/AEM.02816-17
Don’s paper is out!
Yay to Ines and Don! Their paper, “Anthropogenic nitrogen deposition ameliorates the decline in tree growth caused by a drier climate”, in Ecology is now online. It is aboutthe effects of N-dep on tree growth in drier conditions and can be found at doi 10.1002/ecy.2095. Congrats!
Mini-grant for bark microbiome research
Peter Pellitier, Don Zak and Tim James has received a mini-grant, titled “Expanding the Plant Microbiome: Inner Bark Endophytes and Plant Resistance to Emerald Ash Boring Beetles”, from the Integrated Training in Microbial Systems (ITiMS). This mini-grant for $10,000 will go towards research for sampling and studying the bark microbiome in forests in order to...