Overview and Goals for NSF Sponsored Research
Principle Investigator (For other project personnel, see Education)
Eugene L. Madsen
The latest NSF-sponsored research project examines how the biogeochemical cycling of Carbon (biodegradation of organic contaminants) can interact with the cycling of other elements. The key hypothesis of the new project is that as microorganisms oxidize environmental pollutants, they simultaneously cause the accrual of reduced metabolic byproducts, such as Methane, Ammonia, and Sulfide. These, in turn, enrich for microbial populations that carry out new biogeochemical processes that would otherwise be absent from the study site. A major objective of the new project is to discover novel interactions between microbial populations and the processes they catalyze.
Details: data documenting microbial processes in Field Study Sites