Control of nitrous oxide emissions in soils
Duration of contract: 4 years
Planned starting date: ASAP
Place of work: University of Vienna
Main supervisor: Wolfgang Wanek (CV | Lab Homepage)
Supervision team: Clarissa Campbell, Holger Daims, Katharina Kitzinger, Andreas Richter, Petra Pjevac, Hannes Schmidt (external)
This position has been filled.
Project description:
Synthetic communities (SynComs) comprised of mixed heterotrophic bacterial and fungal strains will be complemented with metabolically tractable nitrifiers and denitrifiers with sequenced genomes, and using stable isotope tracing methods, SynCom N2O production/consumption will be monitored online during and after perturbations in parallel, replicated, multifactorial experiments, using mid-infrared laser based gas sensors and mass spectrometry. SynCom composition and activity will be tracked via amplicon sequencing and multi-omics.
The PhD student will help to establish the gnotobiotic soil setup to study the effects of environmental parameters on N2O source and sink processes using 15N tracer approaches. N2O tracing will be performed using isotope laser technology, N cycle intermediates and by-products will be traced by novel mass spectrometric approaches to be developed and adopted by the PhD student. Observed SynCom responses will be compared to natural soil communities from long-term agricultural sites. This will be done in close collaboration with a Postdoc contributing genomics-transcriptomics analysis and helping with SynCom setup.