Upcoming Cover for Applied and Environmental Microbiology

Found out last week that some photos we submitted with our recent article in Applied and Environmental Microbiology will be used on the cover for an upcoming issue! The article described work led by Tarah Sullivan (A.K.A. Microbial Modus) on some soil fungi we isolated from a small arms firing range that can actually dissolve lead! They do this via the secretion of milieu of low molecular weight organic acids into their surroundings as they grow which changes the mineral form and solubility of the lead. We are studying these as part of DoD funded project that is trying to understand the factors contributing to lead bioavailability in contaminated soils. Makes for some pretty cool photos as well. In the age of online digital journals when I’m sure well over 95% of readers will link to our article via the web, I’m not sure if it means as much as it used too. Still it was fun to do, and hopefully it brings some further attention to the scientific work in the paper!

The photos below, clockwise from left, show:
– a sign with the abandoned firing range site where we did the work in the background
– my finger pointing to lead bullets embedded in the soil
– some of the 800 grams of bullets we sieved out and cleaned from our samples
– Several fungi growing on Petri plates with lead carbonate in suspension that are showing a “zone of clearing” around the outer edge of the colony where they have dissolved the lead.

Branch Meeting of the Tennessee/Kentucky chapter of American Society for Microbiology this weekend

Branch Meeting of the Tennessee/Kentucky chapter of the American Society for Microbiology

The schedule of events for the meeting of the local branch of ASM is posted!  Schadt Lab researcher Migun Shakya (Ph.D. Student) will be giving a presentation on his work on the Poplar root microbiome project and Meg Steinweg (Postdoc) will be giving a presentation on her work on the microbial communities of peatland systems at our SPRUCE experiment.  

Publications Page Now Uploaded!

Google Scholar Link

Just put up the mandatory ‘pub list’.  As of now, it is just that, a list.  Perhaps in the future I can add links to pdf files for each, but this will take some time.  

In the meantime, there is a link at the top of the page to my Google Scholar page that should allow you to link to most of these that are available on the web somewhere.  The Google Scholar page will also probably be the most up to date place to find newer pubs. If you have trouble finding something, feel free to drop me a note.

New site for research and lab news

Just starting to put together this site as a spot for research news from my lab, and posts about related scientific work on the web. This will replace the web page I used to have hosted at ORNL, that unfortunately had become difficult to manage and out of date due to onerous IT requirements.