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SUMMARY:Digging into the soil metagenome - Hirsch\, P (Rothamsted Research
 )
DTSTART:20140327T110000Z
DTEND:20140327T114500Z
UID:TALK51654@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Mustapha Amrani
DESCRIPTION:Co-authors: Elisa Loza (Rothamsted Research)\, Tim Mauchline (
 Rothamsted Research)\, Andy Neal (Rothamsted Research)\, Ian Clark (Rotham
 sted Research) \n\nSoil is the most biodiverse environment on earth\, typi
 cally containing 109 bacterial cells from 106 different species per g. At 
 most\, 1% of these cells can grow in the laboratory\; the majority remaine
 d obscure until the recent development of culture-independent methods. Usu
 ally taken for granted\, soil is an invaluable resource providing essentia
 l ecosystem services as well as food to sustain the growing human populati
 on. More information on the genetic diversity of soil communities\, in par
 ticular functional genes for the biological processes that underpin soil q
 uality\, is needed to establish the resilience of the system to perturbati
 on. How many individuals and phylogenetic groups are potentially capable o
 f performing a function? How many of these are active in particular condit
 ions? Are there multiple possible combinations that provide similar functi
 onality? Does the system always return to one combination after perturbati
 on? This is especially relevant to arable agriculture where soils are deli
 berately manipulated to support crop rotations\, during conversion of land
  to different management systems or with increasingly unpredictable climat
 e change. \n\nThe advent of NGS-based metagenomics and metatranscriptomics
  with quantitative data on the presence and activity of phylogenetic and f
 unctional groups provides an unprecedented opportunity to describe and int
 erpret soil biological systems. Long-term field experiments at Rothamsted 
 Research enable comparison of the relative impact of different fertilizer 
 inputs\, crops and cultivation on microbial communities. Data amassed on t
 hese soils including 16S rRNA gene amplicons\, full metagenomes and transc
 riptomes will be presented. At present\, the large volumes of the datasets
 \, the lack of appropriate analytical pipelines and relevant statistics is
  a constraint on processing and analysing the data. Nevertheless\, it has 
 generated information on which groups respond to nitrogen fertilizer\, plo
 ughing and changes in plant cover. \n
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Newton Institute
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