Achievement

A large integrated study focused on the systems biology of five high-temperature environments in YNP was completed and published in PLoS One, involving several IGERT Ph.D. students and IGERT faculty (MSU and collaborating institutions). The integrated science brought together in this study resulted in a detailed description of the microbial metabolism of predominant community members under several different geochemical conditions. The project focused on chemotrophic systems where primary productivity appears to be driven by reduced inorganic constituents including Fe and S. This information forms the basis for microbial community network modeling in several IGERT case study projects used in both DGED 610 and 611 (NSF IGERT curricula) and individual student Ph.D. projects, and laid important ground work for several additional publications on analysis of metagenome data from YNP model communities.