Microbiome-Based Improvement of Nitrogen Nutrition in Crop Production
Duration of contract: 4 years
Planned starting date: January 2024
Place of work: AIT, Tulln an der Donau
Main supervisor: Angela Sessitsch (CV)
Supervision team: Wolfgang Wanek, Dagmar Wöbken, Hanna Koch (external)
This position has been filled.
Project description:
The PhD position is embedded in a multi-disciplinary team and includes the following experimental steps:
- Collection of soil samples, greenhouse experiments, collection of phenotypic data to select candidate microbiomes for further processing.
- Molecular analyses of candidate microbiomes, including DNA isolation, PCR-based and metagenome analysis of N-cycling and plant N transporters as well as general microbial community composition to identify keystone and core microbial taxa (in cooperation with other project members).
- High-throughput isolation of microorganisms to establish a strain collection.
- Genome analysis of key isolates.
- Experiments to determine the effect of collaboromes on plant phenotype with focus on N nutrition.
All these steps aim to gain more insight into how microbes influence the N budget of plants. In addition to this scientific goal, one prime aim is to provide the framework for a successful PhD thesis, including excellent supervision and the possibility to cooperate with different partners and attend (inter)national conferences.