OOS 29-1 - Disentangling soil organisms' metabolic responses and acclimation to environmental gradients through ecometabolomics

Created by living things, metabolites or organic compounds are found throughout the world, in soils and seas, animals, microorganisms and every cell of the human body. They have various functions and influence on the environment, including fuel, signaling, stimulatory and inhibitory effects on enzymes, catalytic activity of their own, defense, and interactions with other organisms. Yet their varied responses to environmental change make determining their role in the ecosystem challenging and hard to implement in current ecosystem models. Given that many ecosystems are undergoing rapid environmental changes, obtaining a process-level understanding of the mechanisms that affect metabolite or organic compound production and transformation in soil systems and their function and interactions is important for predicting the responses of microbial communities and plants to system perturbation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  Considering that metabolomics and multi-omics integration approaches in soil systems are still in their infancy, my talk will go over our efforts for (i) developing the tools needed to (ii) answer the scientific questions of interest. I will be providing examples of cases studies where metabolomics and multi-omics were used to understand microbial activity in diverse ecosystems. These approaches are designed to be readily translatable across biomes, diverse ecological settings, diverse organisms, and the agricultural/wildland interface.