Jennifer Wen, a former SEAS Master’s student in the Zak lab, now has a paper out titled “Ammonium oxidation by bacteria and archaea have functional implications for nitrification across a forested landscape”. This work draws on her thesis work on the amoA gene of archaea along a natural nitrogen mineralization gradient, but it expanded the scope to include ammonia-oxidizing bacteria in the same system. The amoA gene encodes for the gene that is the first step in nitrification, which converts ammonium (NH3+) to nitrite (NO2-), and understanding the diversity and composition of this gene can give us a better understanding for how nitrogen moves through the system. Using self-generated primers, Jennifer found that there were distinct communities across the sites and two environmental variables, soil pH and nitrogen mineralization, were significantly related to the community composition.
The paper is out in Ecosphere and can be found here.
