| date | | Monday, December 14th 2009, 17 c.t. |
| location | | G2-104, CeBiTec Building |
| speaker | | Prof. Dr. Christoph Tebbe
Institut für Biodiversität, Johann Heinrich von Thünen-Institut (vTI), Braunschweig |
| title | | The search for factors shaping soil microbial diversity |
| | | Soils are the largest reservoir of microbial diversity on Earth and the biogeochemical transformations of elements in soils are mainly a result of microbial activities. Even though microbiologists have retrieved a large diversity of microorganisms from soils in pure cultures and explored their metabolic potentials and regulations in great detail during the last decades, the characterization of the whole soil microbiome, its composition, adaptability, vulnerability and its functional redundancy and synergy is still only at its beginning. High throughput DNA sequencing technologies will be a key technology to provide fundamental knowledge in this endeavour. In order to select the appropriate samples for future metagenome and metatranscriptome analyses however, deeper knowledge about the most important factors selecting and shaping soil microbial communities is desirable. In our studies we try to identify such factors at different scales ranging from the soil particle fractions to geographical regions. Results will be presented on studies in which soils were fractionated into different particle size classes and 16S rRNA gene analyses were applied to capture the diversity and metabolic activity for metabolizing a model compound. Soil variants generated by more than 100 years of different soil fertilization regimes were investigated with the Phylochip® technology (DNA microarrays) to identify organisms being most responsive to the change of soil organic carbon. Multivariate statistical tools were applied to search for the most important environmental descriptors that modify the soil microbial community in response to agricultural activity within a well defined semi-arid agricultural region. The responsiveness of the soil microbiome to different soil components and external influences will be discussed. |
| host | | Prof. Dr. Alfred Pühler |
