Microbial life and climate change in drylands (NERC GW4+ DTP Projects 2018-19)

The aim of this project is to characterise how microbial diversity in dryland soils changes in response to land degradation and the implications for nutrient cycles. Specifically, the objectives are to: 1) establish the microbial diversity in dryland soils along a degradation gradient based on metagenomic data. The degradation gradient can be considered a proxy for climate change, and 2) understand how microbial groups (e.g., bacteria and archaea) contribute to essential metabolic functions and nutrient cycles such as carbon and nitrogen cycles. Methods: We will carry out this work in the Santa Rita Experimental Range in SE Arizona, USA, which has a wealth of long term data (since the early 1900s) on climate, soils, vegetation amongst others, and where co-supervisor Michaelides is already carrying out research on nutrient cycling and land degradation. At Bristol, the student will learn to grow and isolate strains of bacterial phototrophs in the lab, and basic molecular biology techniques (e.g., DNA extraction, PCR). During this project the student will also learn computational skills on comparative genomics to analyse genomic and metagenomic data generated in the lab and from publicly available databases (e.g., NCBI, JGI, MGRast).