Conveners
Biology - Parallel
- RAJESH SANI (SD School of Mines and Technology)
Candidate bacterial phylum Omnitrophota has never been grown in axenic culture and is poorly understood. Here, we combined analysis of 421 Omnitrophota genomes representing six classes and 276 species and show that they are prevalent in water, sediments, and soils globally. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting and differential size filtration showed ultra-small (~0.2 μm) cells to be common...
The Black Hills of South Dakota contain extensive natural cave systems, including some of the longest mapped caves in the world. Carbonate caves globally are are known to host a diversity of microorganisms; however, we know comparatively little about the biology and geochemistry of caves in the Black Hills region. As a first step towards exploring the diversity of microbial life in natural...
The Earth's subsurface is host to significant and diverse microbial populations. The nature of this biomass is poorly characterized, partially due to the inherent difficulty of sampling, in situ studies, and isolation of the in situ microbes. Recently, many studies have focused on harnessing the ability of microbes to interact extracellularly with redox-active substrates for energy/growth....
Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are gaining attention in the family of polyesters polymers due to its biodegradability and biocompatibility. The polymer molecular structure is decided by the biosynthetic pathways of microbes employed for PHA synthesis which is influenced by the bacterial species, substrate utilized, and the culturing conditions provided. There are more than100 PHA polymer...
Methane is one of the most common sources of energy and carbon in the deep biosphere, and methanotrophy is hypothesized to sustain diverse microbial communities alongside chemolithoautotrophy in subsurface systems. However, the extent of the contribution of methanotrophy to primary production and C-cycling remains unknown, due to our lack of knowledge about the distribution, diversity,...
