Simple Rules Govern Soil Microbiome Responses to Environmental Change
Research from a team with Professor Madhav Mani, ESAM PhD graduate and former Northwestern postdoctoral researcher Siqi Liu, and UChicago scientists shows how environmental changes lead to predictable responses in soil microbiome metabolism.
Just like any living organism, the soil has its own metabolism. Plants, worms, insects, and most importantly, microorganisms in the soil, break down organic matter, consume and generate nutrients, and process other materials to give the soil a life of its own. Soil microbiomes, which drive much of the metabolism in these ecosystems, are immensely complex – comprised of thousands of species with untold interactions and dynamics.
Given the complexity of the soil, however, it can be nearly impossible to understand how the communities of microbes living there respond to changes in the environment, such as temperature, moisture, acidity, and nutrient availability. Solving this problem is critical if we want to understand how soil microbiomes adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions and climate change.
New research from a team with Professor Madhav Mani, ESAM PhD graduate and former Northwestern postdoctoral researcher Siqi Liu, and University of Chicago scientists shows that a deceptively simple mathematical model can describe how the soil responds to environmental change. Using just two variables, the model shows that changes in pH levels consistently result in three distinct metabolic states of the community.
Liu, a former graduate student in Mani's lab now at Boston University, was the paper's co-first author. Mani was the study's co-corresponding author.