{"id":64174,"date":"2021-10-13T13:15:31","date_gmt":"2021-10-13T20:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=64174"},"modified":"2021-10-13T13:15:31","modified_gmt":"2021-10-13T20:15:31","slug":"purcell-qsip-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/purcell-qsip-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Warming slows microbes\u2019 growth, NAU researchers find in first-in-kind long-term experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a\u00a0first-of-its-kind\u00a0warming experiment, researchers at Northern Arizona University found that microbes growth rate decreased over 15 years of warming.\u00a0The research,\u00a0published this week in\u00a0<\/span>Global Change Biology<\/span><\/i><\/a>, showed that under warmer climate conditions, growth decreased among all types of microbes in the community, and suggested that a loss of soil carbon may be responsible for the slowdown.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In order to\u00a0investigate the\u00a0effect\u00a0of warming on microbial communities, the team\u00a0transplanted cylinders of soil from high-elevation forests north of Flagstaff to lower, warmer meadows to simulate climate warming, transplanting others at the highest elevation as controls.\u00a0Over\u00a015 years, the lower-elevation transplants\u00a0were\u00a0watered\u00a0to match higher precipitation of their\u00a0original climate, and researchers removed samples of the soil at\u00a0regular\u00a0intervals.\u00a0Using quantitative stable isotope probing, or\u00a0qSIP, a technique developed at NAU, the research team\u00a0used water \u201clabeled\u201d with enriched oxygen to\u00a0see which microbes incorporated the element into their DNA\u2014a sign of growth.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis study is the first to look at how individual microbial taxa respond to long-term warming in the wild,\u201d said\u00a0<\/span>Alicia Purcell<\/span><\/b>, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society\u00a0(Ecoss).\u00a0\u201cWe were surprised to find\u00a0very little variation in how the microbes responded to climate warming\u2014growth slowed universally in this community.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Purcell said the team also found that rare bacterial taxa were some of the fastest growers, underscoring the importance of detangling different organisms\u2019 responses from one another.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These results offer an interesting counterpoint to short-term, laboratory-based\u00a0warming experiments, which have shown that\u00a0the\u00a0growth of many\u00a0microbes\u00a0spikes under warmer conditions.\u00a0Purcell\u2019s team emphasized that a combination of factors, including plant productivity, nutrient cycling and\u00a0loss of soil carbon are likely contributors to the warming effect they witnessed.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur results suggest that, in the case of warming, the community response tells us what we need to know,\u201d said <\/span>Bruce\u00a0Hungate<\/span><\/b>, senior author and director of Ecoss. \u201cThat\u2019s really useful as we try to better model microbes\u2019 complex contributions and responses to a changing climate. These results represent a new era, in which qSIP permits us to detect signals about what\u2019s happening in soil without the noise that laboratory conditions introduce.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Purcell was recently awarded a grant through the\u00a0competitive\u00a0<\/span>Community Science Program<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of the Joint Genome Institute. The\u00a0national\u00a0award\u00a0offers her technical support to process soil samples she collected in Antarctica two years ago as part of a\u00a0different\u00a0soil\u00a0warming experiment. Based on the Marr Ice Piedmont\u00a0Glacier\u00a0on\u00a0the\u00a0West Antarctic\u00a0Peninsula, Purcell, along with principal investigator\u00a0Natasja\u00a0van\u00a0Gestel\u00a0and\u00a0graduate researcher\u00a0Kellie McMillan of Texas Tech University, are asking how microbes, previously locked in ice and frozen ground in Antarctica, are behaving as the climate there warms.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other NAU co-authors contributed to this study, including\u00a0<\/span>Michaela\u00a0Hayer,<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>Benjamin J. Koch<\/span><\/b>,\u00a0<\/span>Rebecca L. Mau<\/span><\/b>,\u00a0<\/span>Pau<\/span><\/b>l<\/span>\u00a0Dijkstra,\u00a0Michelle C. Mack<\/span><\/b>,\u00a0<\/span>Jane C. Marks<\/span><\/b>,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Egbert\u00a0Schwartz<\/span><\/b>\u00a0of\u00a0Ecoss, as well as Steven J.\u00a0Blazewicz\u00a0and Jennifer\u00a0Pett-Ridge of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ember Morrissey of West Virginia University and Rachel Rubin of Mount Holyoke College.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Graphic by Victor O. Leshyk, Ecoss<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Northern<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kate Petersen | Center for Ecosystem Science and Society<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a\u00a0first-of-its-kind\u00a0warming experiment, researchers at Northern Arizona University found that microbes growth rate decreased over 15 years of warming.\u00a0The research,\u00a0published this week in\u00a0Global Change Biology, showed that under warmer climate conditions, growth decreased among all types of microbes in the community, and suggested that a loss of soil carbon may be responsible for the slowdown.\u00a0…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":64175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}