In a collaboration with the Yoshikuni lab at JGI and the Dangl lab at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Lauren Jabusch of the Northen Lab demonstrated imaging of 9 different colors of fluorescent bacteria within a single EcoFAB. This work is part of the paper “CRAGE-Duet Facilitates Modular Assembly […]
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We have a new publication with scientists at the University of California Davis and the University of Texas at Austin: “Bioactive Diterpenoids Impact the Composition of the Root-Associated Microbiome in Maize (Zea mays).” Metabolomics analysis identified dolabralexin diterpenoids as metabolites that influence the rhizosphere and bacterial communities associated with maize. […]
Trent Northen was recently interviewed by Richard Jacobs, host of the Finding Genius podcast, in a conversation titled “Living Earth: Studying the Microbial Community in Soil.” The Finding Genius podcast highlights experts conducting novel and exciting research in health, medicine, and biosciences topics. In the interview, he discusses his research […]
The importance of understanding microbe-plant interactions is becoming ever more important with the growing need for more sustainable agriculture and for understanding global nutrient cycling. Lab and field studies have historically focused on simple lab consortia or complex natural microbiomes. In these approaches, there exists numerous challenges, specifically in the […]
An intriguing discussion on the use of metagenomics and metabolomics in development of sustainable fuels at Lawrence Berkeley Lab
Since the development of nanostructure-initiator mass spectrometry (NIMS), we have been working to find a way of producing these surfaces without the use of electrochemical HF etching, which poses both major safety implications and greatly limits the wide-spread implementation of NIMS. Here, we show that inductively coupled plasma (ICP) reactive […]
Here we highlight current high-throughput MS-based platforms and their potential application in metabolomics. Although current MS platforms can reach throughputs up to 0.5 seconds per sample, the metabolite coverage of these platforms are low compared to low-throughput, separation-based MS methods. High-throughput comes at a cost, as it’s a trade-off between sample throughput […]
Here we examine the exometabolite composition of desert biological soil crusts (biocrusts) and the substrate preferences of seven biocrust isolates. The biocrust’s main primary producer releases a diverse array of metabolites, and isolates of physically associated taxa use unique subsets of the complex metabolite pool. Individual isolates use only 13−26% […]
Here we review exometabolomics approaches and applications to show how this simple technique can provide critical insights into phenotypes, cellular interactions and environmental transformations. We highlight how this approach can be used in rapid phenotyping assays that are becoming popular in drug development, synthetic biology, biofuel development, and investigating the […]
In this article we describe the development of a simple soil metabolomics workflow and a novel spike recovery approach for the analysis of soil organic matter (SOM). The cycling of SOM by microorganisms is a critical component of the global carbon cycle but remains poorly understood. There is an emerging […]