Trent Northen, Ph.D., Senior Scientist and Deputy Director, Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division of Berkeley Lab, Understanding the chemistry of microbiomes to enable soil carbon sequestration and sustainable agriculture
Speaker:
Trent Northen, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist and Deputy Director, Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division of Berkeley Lab
Laboratory Research Manager m-CAFEs SFA Program, Director of High-Throughput Biochemistry at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and Metabolomics Program Lead at the DOE Joint Genome Institute
Adjunct Professor:
Comparative Biochemistry Program, University of California, Berkeley
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
Faculty Host: Michelle O'Malley
Title: Understanding the chemistry of microbiomes to enable soil carbon sequestration and sustainable agriculture
Abstract:
There is an immediate need for technologies to sequester gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere to avoid severe effects of climate change. A wide range of approaches are being explored, many of which will take many years and huge capital investments to implement. One of the most promising short-term, low capital, options is to use plants and microbes to store carbon in soils. Soils contains more carbon than the Earth’s atmosphere and biomass combined. However, they have lost an estimated 133 Gt of carbon (top 2 meters, mostly in the last 200 years) making them a natural target for storage. Restoring soil carbon has additional benefits including improving soil fertility. Plants fix atmospheric CO2 and pump approximately 20% into soil where it supports beneficial microbes. Recent work has shown that it is possible to engineer plants with up to 20% higher carbon fixation rates. Unfortunately, >95% of the fixed carbon released by plant roots is rapidly metabolized to microbes, returning it to the atmosphere within one year. Gigaton-scale carbon sequestration could be achieved by engineering plants with 10% higher carbon fixation where 30% of the additional carbon released into the soil is persistent (residence time >100 years). Our research is aimed at identifying the chemical properties of persistent soil organics and understanding the mechanisms governing their persistence. To do this we use mass spectrometry to characterize thousands of unique organic components and measure their relative stability to microbial degradation. We use fabricated ecosystems to discover plants and microbes that produce these compounds so that they can be used in carbon sequestration strategies. These findings and approaches help lay a foundation for harnessing plant and microbial systems for soil carbon storage.
Bio:
Dr. Trent Northen is Deputy Division Director and a Senior Scientist within the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division at Berkeley Lab, Adjunct Professor of Comparative Biochemistry at UC Berkeley, the Metabolomics Program Lead at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, Laboratory Research Manager for the multi-institutional m-CAFEs SFA program, Director of High Throughput Biochemistry at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and Assistant Director of the RESTOR-C DOE Carbon Negative Earth Shot. Dr. Northen obtained his BS in Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara, his PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Arizona State University and performed Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Scripps Research Institute. His work has been recognized by several awards include a DOE Early Career Award, the Berkeley Lab Director's Award for Exceptional Service Achievement, R&D100 awards, Berkeley Lab Biosciences Inventor of the Year awards, and a Presidential Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by President Obama. Dr. Northen’s laboratory focuses on understanding the role of exogenous small molecule metabolites in mediating microbial interactions with other microbes and plant hosts and how these processes impact soil carbon cycling. A long-term goal of the Northen lab is to help harness plants and microbes for sustainable agriculture—including to restore soil carbon as a climate change mitigation strategy. Towards these goals the Northen lab has developed a range of metabolomic, cheminformatic, and bioinformatic capabilities for metabolite identification and analysis. Dr. Northen has also championed the development of fabricated ecosystems spanning scales and complexity.
https://fabricatedecosystems.lbl.gov/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL0lNim-FRg
https://jgi.doe.gov/our-science/science-programs/metabolomics-technology/
