Control of nitrous oxide emissions in soils
Duration of contract: 3 years
Planned starting date: ASAP
Place of work: University of Vienna
Main supervisor: Katharina Kitzinger (CV | Lab Homepage)
Supervision team: Holger Daims, Bernhard Lendl, Hannes Schmidt (external), Michael Wagner, Wolfgang Wanek
This position has been filled.
Project description:
Heterotrophic mixed bacterial/fungal SynComs 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 postdoc will plan and help with the setup of gnotobiotic soil communities together with the project’s PhD student and technical assistant. The postdoc will study the effect of synthetic community composition (N-cycling pathway length), and how high N2O concentrations and specific fertilizers affect both, synthetic communities and natural soil communities from long-term soil research sites. Key methods of this position will include stable isotope analyses, qPCR, and amplicon and -omics analyses of the community responses to the applied perturbations.