Wetlands, Microbes, and the Carbon Cycle

Susannah Tringe, who leads the Metagenome Program at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a collaboration in which Berkeley Lab plays a leading role, goes behind the scenes to show how DNA from unknown wild microbes is extracted and analyzed to see what role they play in the carbon cycle. Tringe collects samples of microbial communities living in the wetlands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, organisms that can determine how these wetlands store or release carbon.

Transcript

00:00:03 [Music] my name is Suzanna tring and I head the metag genome program here at the US Department of Energy's joint genome Institute which is a DNA sequencing Center run by the department of energy where we use high throughput SE ing to study all variety of organisms ranging from plants and fungi to [Music]

00:00:40 microbes I recently received an early career award from the Department of energy to study wetlands and their potential to capture carbon from the environment this pilot patch here in the Sacramento sanin River delta is a wetland restoration project to see if Wetland restoration can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and addition to restoring the wildlife habitat that

00:01:02 the wetlands once provided the way we study the microbial communities here is by collecting the sediment with a special coring device and bringing it back to the lab where we can extract DNA from all the microbial communities present uh that DNA can then be fed into DNA sequencing machines which will put out data telling us what was in the genomes of those organisms and we could

00:01:23 better understand what role they play in the environment and their carbon uh cycling potential The Joint genome Institute is an ideal place to carry out this research because the scale of our sequencing operation really allows us to study these microbial communities at a depth that really wouldn't be possible anywhere else and moreover being affiliated with

00:01:45 Lawrence Berkeley National Lab gives us access to really outstanding biological and environmental scientists in addition to their supercomputing Center nurse whose computational capacity has been really critical to our ability to analyze the sequence output that we produce in the long run our metagenomics research could help us understand

00:02:06 microbial communities and their contributions to the carbon cycle and could help us manage our environments in a way that prevent excess carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere and possibly even sequester it which could influence climate change and the long-term future of our planet other work we're doing here could lead to improved biofuels or improved growth of

00:02:27 biofuel crops all of which are very important to the Department of Energy's mission in improving the environment and reducing our dependency on fossil fuels