A nationwide map of soil bacterial biodiversity and determination of environmental controls on community structure
Lead Research Organisation:
NERC CEH (Up to 30.11.2019)
Department Name: Molecular Microbial Ecology
Abstract
Detecting and quantifying our biodiversity is a fundamental prerequisite to understanding how our ecosystems and their services are formed, and how natural and anthropogenic factors effect ecosystem viability. Whilst this is well advanced for most fields of animal and plant ecology, the microscopic nature of bacteria means we have virtually no understanding of what the major groups of bacteria, or their distributions, are within Great Britain. Critically, bacteria perform central roles in enhancing plant productivity and biogeochemical nutrient cycling. It is imperative that we understand which major groups are present, what controls their distribution, and how environmental changes occurring now, and in the future, will affect the diversity of their populations, the biogeochemical functions they perform and how this maps to integrated ecosystem assessments. In this application, we propose to address this shortfall by assessing the occurrence of major terrestrial bacterial groups across the whole of England, Scotland and Wales, as part of the upcoming Countryside Survey of 2007. In this globally unique approach, we will detect bacterial groups by high throughput molecular biological methods, measure key soil chemistry parameters, and co-analyse these data rich variables to address several key hypotheses. Further, we will produce high resolution maps of bacterial group distribution across Great Britain and couple these data to existing publicly available data, disseminated through the world wide web, within the Countryside Survey 2007 core programme. Finally, during the process of this investigation, we will form and archive a nationally accessible genome bank for use by other investigators in order that they may address their own specific hypotheses in relation to other microbial groups and processes.
Organisations
Publications
Raymond B
(2008)
Ecological consequences of ingestion of Bacillus cereus on Bacillus thuringiensis infections and on the gut flora of a lepidopteran host.
in Journal of invertebrate pathology
Bell T
(2010)
Protists have divergent effects on bacterial diversity along a productivity gradient.
in Biology letters
O'Donnell A
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Stable Isotope Probing and Related Technologies
Ciric L
(2010)
Hydrocarbon utilization within a diesel-degrading bacterial consortium.
in FEMS microbiology letters
Drigo B
(2010)
Shifting carbon flow from roots into associated microbial communities in response to elevated atmospheric CO2.
in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Ciric L
(2010)
Field scale molecular analysis for the monitoring of bacterial community structures during on-site diesel bioremediation.
in Bioresource technology
Glücksman E
(2010)
Closely related protist strains have different grazing impacts on natural bacterial communities.
in Environmental microbiology
Griffiths RI
(2011)
The bacterial biogeography of British soils.
in Environmental microbiology
Yilmaz P
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Minimum information about a marker gene sequence (MIMARKS) and minimum information about any (x) sequence (MIxS) specifications.
in Nature biotechnology
Dupont AÖ
(2016)
Differences in soil micro-eukaryotic communities over soil pH gradients are strongly driven by parasites and saprotrophs.
in Environmental microbiology