New publication Nature Communications!

I’m super excited to share with you our new paper in Nature Communications Earth & Environment about viral infections of sulfide oxidizing bacteria! Congrats to Alice Bosco for championing this idea and bringing it all together!

New NASA funding!

We were funded by NASA to study how natural populations viruses control photosynthetic sulfur bacteria. Research shows that bacteria in seawater or corals are strongly influenced by viruses. We think that the blooms of purple bacteria in anoxic lakes may also be influenced by viral communities. If correct, this would revolutionize our understanding of the conditions that promote or prevent microbial blooms. To date, most of the controls have thought to been sunlight and sulfide; however, viruses may be the hidden figures behind the persistence and activity of photosynthetic bacteria.

This project is with: Alice Bosco Santos (University of Lausanne), Cynthia Silveira (U Miami), Joe Werne (U Pittsburgh) and Molly O’Beirne (U Pittsburgh)

More about NASA Exobiology here

ACS SEED sampling core

Nahum and Bawi did an excellent job of sampling Ordovician drill core from Ben Datillo’s lab at IPFW.

Welcome ACS Project SEED interns

Bawi Sung and Nahum Gerezgher are both American Chemical Society Project SEED interns in our lab this summer. Bawi is studying Ordovician carbonates and Nahum is studying iron chemistry of a northern Indiana lake. Both are doing an awesome job.

Bawi Sung (foreground) and Nahum Gerezgher (background) homogenizing samples.