Achievement

A primary research outcome involving all the trainees is the finding of a strong nitrogen gradient spanning the salt marsh creek that that the trainees decided to sample for microbial composition using high throughput DNA sequencing. While earlier studies had shown such a pattern, this had not been confirmed in about 20 years. The presence of this gradient is critical for one of the main research themes of this IGERT program: ‘organismal responses to environmental gradients’. With technical assistance from researchers in co-PI Zoe Cardon’s laboratory at MBL, a strong nitrogen gradient has been documented in the polluted creek that the trainees sampled, and the complete lack of such a gradient has been confirmed in the clean ‘reference’ creek the trainees sampled nearby. This allows for an effective test of the hypothesis that environmental stressors alter the microbial community composition of these habitats.