Category: News

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!

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...

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...

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 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 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

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!

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...

Elizabeth Entwistle’s paper in Ecological Monographs is now online. It is titled “Anthropogenic N deposition increases soil C storage by reducing the relative abundance of lignolytic fungi” and can be found at doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1288 Congrats!

Sydney Salley, our ever valiant and constant source of bright cheerfulness, will be leaving the Soils lab in order to pursue her PhD UC Davis (Geology) in Dawn Sumner’s lab. During her time in the lab, Sydney was the master of optimizing new-to-us DNA extraction protocols, including for both root and bark samples. She also...