Category: News

Another Ecology paper for the Soils lab! Don’s paper, “Anthropogenic N deposition, fungal gene expression, and an increasing soil carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere”, in Ecology is now online. It discusses how the expression of fungal class II peroxidases were down regulated under experimentally increased N deposition and how this impacts greater soil C...

A new paper is out for the Zak lab! A former EEB PhD student, Huijie Gan, has published her work on oribatid mites and how their communities are structured in Pedobiologia. The manuscript, titled “Scale dependency of dispersal limitation, environmental filtering and biotic interactions determine the diversity and composition of oribatid mite communities”, can be...

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...

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!