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 first step toward achieving this integration is identifying the global diversity of soil microbial communities and their functions related to carbon cycling. This will be the goal of this M2 internship. To accomplish this, the M2 student will analyze high-quality metagenomic data on soil microbes worldwide, extract functional traits using computational approaches, and identify regional patterns (Aim 2 in Figure 1).
This project will provide excellent networking opportunities with LSCE (e.g., Philippe Ciais, Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Jean Jouzel) and ENS Ulm researchers (e.g., Chris Bowler, Regis Ferriere) as well as international experts in the field. It will closely interact with an international project called ‘Carbon Loss In Plants, Soils, and Oceans’ (CALIPSO), which aims to improve predictions of vulnerable carbon in forests, oceans, and soils. The CALIPSO project involves leading researchers, including Philippe Ciais at LSCE, Stefano Manzoni at Stockholm University, and Steve Allison at the University of California, Irvine, in the soil team; Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia and Laurent Bopp at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris in the ocean team; and Ana Bastos at Leipzig University and Pierre Friedlingstein at Exeter University in the vegetation biomass team.
This position requires a good background in bioinformatics.
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