Cross-Kingdom Interactions

Congratulations to our project affiliate, Dr. Christina Hazard for being awarded an Early Career Grant from the French National Research Agency (ANR). Dr. Hazard’s grant titled: “Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi interactions in the nitrogen cycle for mitigating nitrous oxide emissions from agroecosystems” was one of six grants funded this year!

We would like to congratulate one of our project affiliates, Dr. Mia Sungeon Lee, who successfully completed and defended her PhD Thesis: ” Virus-host interactions across a soil pH gradient at the community and individual scale” this past September! Dr. Lee was advised by Dr. Graeme Nicol and Dr. Christina Hazard in the department Laboratoire Ampère at the École Centrale de Lyon, University of Lyon. Congratulations again!

In an essay from The Economist this month titled, “The Viral Universe,” CKI’s work at the Hopland Research and Extension Center is mentioned as part of their story about the way viruses have big impacts on ecology and evolution as well as human health. Read from an excerpt below:

For such profound propinquity, move from the free-flowing oceans to the more structured world of soil, where potential self-sacrificers can nestle next to each other. Its structure makes soil harder to sift for genes than water is. But last year Mary Firestone of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues used metagenomics to count 3,884 new viral species in a patch of Californian grassland. That is undoubtedly an underestimate of the total diversity; their technique could see only viruses with RNA genomes, thus missing, among other things, most bacteriophages.

The Economist, Aug 2020

We’re elated to have our work shared with the public through this essay shedding light on the immense importance of the extreme diversity that can be found in the soil-microbe world.

For more, you can find the full essay here.