Updates & News

Molecular-level impacts of global change on natural organic matter Global warming is closely linked to natural organic matter on the Earth via its decomposition to greenhouse gas. Natural organic matter represents one of the largest and most active carbon reservoirs in aquatic ecosystems and fuels biogeochemical cycles. However, the diversity of [...] Read more

In July 2023, PhD student Beryl conducted a field trip to sample streams located in Kisumu, Kenya. These streams are belong to the tributaries of Lake Victoria, the largest lake in Africa and the main reservoir of the Nile, and located among Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The purpose of the trip was to collect water and sediment samples for [...] Read more

Global change is altering Earth’s biogeochemical cycles by rewiring the links between microbes and organic matter. However, < 1% of bacterial species have been cultured, and fewer than half of the identifiable major bacterial lineages or phyla include cultivated representatives. Similarly, a large proportion of natural organic matter remains [...] Read more

Dissolved organic matter (DOM) is a complex and diverse mixture of labile and recalcitrant molecules that actively shape the biogeochemical cycles of all ecosystems on Earth. Compared to bulk carbon pools traditionally considered, the partitioning of organic matter into various fractions, such as particulate and mineral-associated pools or labile [...] Read more

We are excited to have our study just published in Nature Communications. This study is led by Dr. Ang Hu, and focuses on the associations between dissolved organic matter (DOM) and microbes. Briefly, we developed a new approach by considering the ecological networks of DOM and microbes and null models to quantify their interactions. We then [...] Read more

We just have a review paper published on line by New Phytologist. In this review, we summarise the literature of mountainous microbes and provide perspetives for future studies. We appreciate a lot of colleagues in helping and supporting our studies on mountainsides in the past 15 years, and are excited to see this piece of work as a milestone for [...] Read more

Ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) of the phylum Thaumarchaeota are widespread across a great variety of ecosystems and play a significant role in global nitrogen and carbon cycling. Since the first reports of the non-extremely archaea from marine water column [1, 2], there are increasingly advancements in our understanding of the ecology and [...] Read more

How does microbial species performance respond to environmental changes? Such a simple question is challenging to answer with quantitative measurements, especially for complex communities. We just got a paper published on line in Ecology to help in answering this question. Based on stable isotope labelling of DNA, we propose a new approach namely [...] Read more