Identifying evolutionary patterns of soil microbes under climate change using metagenomic data

This M2 intern position is part of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant GAMEchange, with the overarching goal of integrating microbial evolution into land surface models. Why care about soils? Soils contain more organic carbon than the atmosphere and plants combined. And why care about microbes? First, soil microbes release four times more carbon dioxide than the fossil fuel industry. Second, predictions of global soil carbon are 20% more accurate when microbes are included in models compared to when they are not. Yet, soil microbes and their adaptation to climate change are still not integrated into IPCC models.

The goal of this project is to characterize the evolution of soil microbes in response to climate change. To achieve this, the M2 intern will analyze Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs) collected from global change experiments, extract functional traits with computational approaches, and analyze them to estimate evolutionary characteristics such as rate and magnitude (Aim 1 in Figure 1). Two global change experiments have already been identified (Harvard Forest, Loma Ridge California).

This project offers excellent international networking opportunities with leading researchers in environmental microbial evolution on top of the advisory board:
• Serita Frey (University of New Hampshire), who has led a 30-year warming experiment in Harvard Forest (doi.org/10.1126/science.aan2874).
• Steve Allison and Ashish Malik (UC Irvine and University of Edinburgh, respectively), who have conducted a 15-year drought experiment in Loma Ridge, California.
• Jennifer Martiny (UC Irvine), who has recently shifted the theoretical framework on investigating microbial evolution in the field (https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14209).
• Régis Ferrière and Antonin Affholder (Ulm and University of Arizona), with expertise in evolutionary theory (doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01372-6).
• Laurent Bopp and Boris Sauterey (LOCEAN), specialists in evolutionary theory and ocean plankton evolution modeling (doi.org/10.1093/plankt/fbu078).

This position requires a good background in bioinformatics.