Desertification is a significant problem for arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions of Earth, whereby grasslands and shrublands become a comparatively barren desert as vegetation disappears over ...

Researchers have unveiled a surprising new way that soil microbes can use sunlight energy—even after the lights go out. A team from Kunming University of Science and Technology and the University of ...

Johns Hopkins University geneticists and a small army of researchers across the country, including students, are working to catalog the vast and largely unknown soil microbiome of the United States.

Researchers discovered that microbes respire three times as much CO2 from lignin carbons compared to cellulose carbons. When soil microbes eat plant matter, the digested food follows one of two ...

In agricultural production, microplastics have become environmental pollutants that cannot be ignored. They may not only enter the food chain through the soil-plant system, threatening food safety, ...

As the planet has warmed, scientists have long been concerned about the potential for harmful greenhouse gasses to seep out of thawing Arctic permafrost. Recent estimates suggest that by 2100 the ...

Image of soil with a close-up of a bacterium and the cellular pathways involved in carbon dioxide productions. Available substrates from soil organic matter are processed through specific pathways ...

If corn was ever jealous of soybean's relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, advancements in gene editing could one day even the playing field. A recent study shows that gene-edited bacteria can ...

Somewhere under a patch of ordinary garden soil, billions of bacteria are quietly going about their business eating organic matter, releasing electrons, and in doing so, producing a faint but constant ...