Mmm... Soil! Microbes, Minerals and Models.

Soils and sediments are truly ‘complex systems’ where physical, chemical, and biological components interact to produce the soil ‘phenotype’. Within these systems, microorganisms are key catalysts that regulate important ecosystem services such as nutrient flux, carbon transformation and stabilization, and water purification. As we move towards an improved understanding of microbial function using the tools of systems biology, we must advance to take advantage of this new knowledge in a quantitative manner. New informatics tools have opened the door to the prediction of function and fitness of soil microorganisms, with hundreds to thousands of genomes being reconstructed from microbial populations using metagenomic approaches. New modeling frameworks that consider this metabolic potential in the context of the fine-scale physical structure and chemical characteristics of soil will allow us to develop theories and establish the rules that govern microbial functional diversity in the soil environment. As a first step towards these integrated models, we have developed BioCrunch – a genome-informed trait-based model within a reactive transport framework. This presentation will provide examples of the emergence of co-existence, cross-feeding and competitive exclusion that occur within microbial communities in heterogeneous environments and will discuss their biogeochemical implications.