Hannah B. Shulman ₊˚ʚ 🧬 ₊˚✧ ﾟ.

Tennessee red valencia peanuts grown in my garden in knoxville, with beautiful nodules of rhizobia 🥜🤎

because...you love it??

Are you an ecologist who lives for fieldwork on wild, rugged terrain? If you dread returning to the lab where your personal style is stifled by required PPE, fear not. Introducing the GLEET™, a BSL-1 compliant Glove for your Feet, for seamless transition from field to lab.

tricky question...I'd say exudation is a metabolic process, whereas rhizodeposition is more like an ecosystem-level phenomenon of total OM contributed by the roots to the soil. Eg. super labile exudates will be respired asap by microbes, and rhizodeposits can be "passive" like root necromass.

Labeling chambers are up and running so these dual-mycorrhizal plants are incorporating 13-CO2 to measure how much they give their fungal mutualists

Barbara McClintock portrait

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Simple & elegant figure from Nagahashi et al 2010 showing synergistic effects of root exudates on hyphal branching in Gigaspora rosea

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Integrating ‘cry for help’ strategies for sustainable agriculture Plants recruit specific soil microbes through a sophisticated ‘cry for help’ strategy to mitigate environmental stresses. Recent advances highlight the potential of leveraging this mechanism to develop microbe-based approaches for enhancing crop health, but challenges remain in refining the criteria and conceptual frameworks to effectively investigate and harness these plant–microbe interactions.

Integrating ‘cry for help’ strategies for sustainable agriculture #plantscience

Cool new paper about diversity effects on mycorrizal resource exchange out in new phyt!!!

I had a great time and learned a lot at the DOE earth system science meeting this past week. Thank you everyone who came to chat with me about our fungal phenology experiment and to all the great presenters ✨💚🌎

GPT o3 tells me "time is the fourth nucleotide" 🔮

I like to use a silva-based bayesian classifer, works great

A framework for integrating genomics, microbial traits, and ecosystem biogeochemistry - Nature Communications Microbes drive the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Here, Li et al. present a framework for integrating genome-inferred microbial kinetic traits into ecosystem mechanistic models, and use it to benchmar...

You know the way we all talk about leveraging 'omics information to improve ecosystem/biogeochemical model performance - well here's a step in that direction - led by Zhen Li integrating across many scientific teams to make this happen www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An ancestral function of strigolactones as symbiotic rhizosphere signals - Nature Communications Strigolactones (SLs) regulate angiosperm development and promote symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizae. Here the authors show that bryosymbiol, an SL present in bryophytes and angiosperms, promotes AM...

Cool paper by Kodama et al...a bryophyte makes Strigolactones (SLs) to recruit mycorrhiza, but doesn't use SL as a growth hormone, showing that SLs first evolved in the ancestor of land plants to initiate symbiosis. Love being reminded that symbiosis is everything.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

want 2 combine datasets produced by different 'omics methods (eg, 16S + ITS) & analyze interkingdom interactions? 🦠🍄

Brunner et al 2024 show that clr-normalizing data separately + accommodating sparsity reduce error, then describe this error "signature" so you can spot it

doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Hey BlueSky! I made a starter pack for folks working on mycorrhizal symbioses. LMK who else to include! go.bsky.app/285P8Tn

Hi! I would love to be added. I study mycorrhizal phenology and controls on N/P cycling!!

Happy valentine’s weeping hemlock day 💚💚

Continental divides separate one drainage basin from another. Here is a gorgeous view of the continental divides in North America. Source: buff.ly/3vKHwq7

Science is a team sport played against ignorance 🧪

Snake gaiters + long sturdy gloves. Situational awareness is key though, so might be a good idea to go with someone familiar with the terrain if possible.

This is my 2x6 soil corer. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My 2x6 soil corer is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

NSF PRFB fellows: talk to your POs and transfer the remaining year’s balance of salary and research funds by 5pm today!! Dm me if you want to join the prfb slack where fellows are sharing info with each other #nsf #nsfprfb

Fungal endophytes could potentially promote plant resilience to climate change. However, across 3 warming experiments (differing in age/species/climate), warming disrupted plant-fungal endophyte symbiosis, with stronger effects in leaves than roots.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you're a scientist that serves on an NSF panel that got cancelled today, I'd love to talk to you about it for an NPR story. DM, email or reach out on signal.

please share: We seek a postdoctoral researcher to join a collaborative team of ecologists in studying the integrated nature of forest functions that are critical for productivity, water and energy usage, and nutrient cycling.

A Global Relationship Between Genome Size and Encoded Carbon Metabolic Strategies of Soil Bacteria We combined a global-scale meta-analysis of 2650 genomes, information on whole-genome sequencing, and a continental-scale metagenomic field study. We found that genome size was tightly associated wit...

📢 New paper in Ecology Letters on assigning Y-yield and A-acquisition strategies of our YAS framework using genomics data; genome size came out as a significant factor.

Led by Xingjie Wu, Jingjing Peng and Shuo Jiao.

doi.org/10.1111/ele....

How your email finds @sporen.bsky.social

Some folks seem to want to blackpill all over the replies, especially given what happens on Monday, so let me add: Every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for. There will never be a point at which the work stops mattering. Take care of your mental health so you don't actively obstruct the work.

And lastly on knowing what you don’t know: