Special Guest Seminar: Arunima Bhattacharjee
December 17, 2025 12:00PM - 1:00PM
This seminar is ZOOM ONLY
Please contact Talya Esquivel for zoom info
Abstract:
Laboratory to Field Experiments using Reduced Complexity Porescale Micromodels.
Microbial biogeochemistry in soils is driven by spatial and temporal positioning of both abiotic and biotic components in soils, where inorganic nutrient cycling reactions are influenced by availability and spatial distribution of resources. Therefore, creating a comprehensive understanding of soil biogeochemical processes requires maintaining the spatial structure of soils during sample collection and analysis. Unfortunately, most bulk analysis cannot maintain this spatial structure in both laboratory and field sample collection. This process of bulk sampling causes loss of information such as specific microbial phenotypes and associated metabolomics, resulting in great deviation in results from lab and field data. To bridge this gap between lab and field generated data, we used pore scale micromodels in “lab to field experiments”. TerraForms porescale micromodels are platforms that emulate the physical (pore network characteristics) and chemical (mineralogy, microbial community distribution) properties of soils, enabling our ability to visualize microbial biogeochemistry in lab and field. In this study, we combined spatial and bulk analysis technologies to create a comprehensive understanding of fungal growth and associated metabolomics across lab and field experiments.
Our results demonstrate that it is possible to bridge the lab to field gap through careful comparison of spatial and bulk experimentation methods. In this presentation, I will talk about fungal driven mineral weathering and acquisition of inorganic nutrients such as K, Fe, Ca etc. in laboratory studies and scaling these experiments for field studies.
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