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!
Matt’s paper was written up in Scientific American
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.
Congrats to Fotis for winning a Sigma Xi grant!
Fotis did it again by winning a graduate research award from Sigma Xi.
Congrats to Fotis for his GSA Research Grant 2018
Fotis was awarded a GSA summer research grant. Nice job!
New DTT paper is published!
Congrats to Martin Kurek who recently published his undergraduate research project in Chemical Geology. We developed a method to use a reducing agent (DTT) to extract elemental sulfur. Nice job Martin! You can download a full copy of the article from the following link for free until April 13, 2018. Kurek et al., Chemical Geology, 481:18-26, 2018.
New sulfide-films method published!
Check out our films method that was published in Marine Chemistry.
We demonstrate that photographic film can capture the spatial concentrations and stable isotope compositions of dissolved sulfide from water columns and pore waters. These films can be used in a wide variety of environments such as our study of the highly dynamic production and oxidation of hydrogen sulfide in the mud of the seagrass meadow shown below.
Midwest Geobiology Symposium at IUPUI
MWGB 2017 was a lot of fun. We had an excellent collection of talks and posters from several schools throughout the Midwest. Generous support from the Agouron Institute, School of Science, and the Department of Earth Sciences made this event possible. Special thanks goes to Lisa Pratt from IU Bloomington for her keynote address about the future of space exploration.