This past
weekend (March11-13) I got the chance to go to Knoxville, TN for the two day
SBS symposium. There were many graduate students and undergraduate students who
attended and shared their past and present biogeochemistry research and fortunately
enough for me I was one of those students. I presented my current research as a
member of the NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity research team this semester on anaerobic
microbial iron reduction in the environment (sediments).
Instead of going over the research that I presented,
I would like to share with you some of the other research that I found interesting
that was presented at the symposium. Right away I noticed an overall theme of most
of the ongoing research and that was the oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of
Mexico. The oil spill in the Gulf in 2010 was the largest, most catastrophic
spill in human history and millions of gallons of oil were released into the
environment.
There were a
lot of projects that focused on microbial bioremediation for the breakdown of
hydrocarbons (oil) in the environment. Research is being done to see which
microbes in the environment are responsible for cleaning up the oil that was
released and under what conditions these microbes need to thrive.Another
project that I liked focused how microbes respond to phosphorus in the
environment. This research investigated how microbes respond to climate change
(temp variation, precip variation, etc.). I learned that microbes in soil have control
over the release of greenhouse gases in the environment by degradation of soil organic
matter.
It’s really
hard to choose which topics to write about because they were all very
interesting. This was actually my first professional conference and I must say,
I would definitely go back or attend another professional conference. The
experience was great and I got a chance to meet a lot of very smart people.
