Amit Kumar

Fungus-farming termites can protect their crop by confining weeds with fungistatic soil boluses The symbiotic agriculture of fungus-farming termites can collapse if they fail to prevent invading weeds. Previous studies suggest a role for symbiotic fungistatic microbes in bringing about weed cont...

When harmful fungi invade their carefully cultivated crops, fungus-farming termites fight back with the precision of skilled gardeners, a new Science study reveals, smothering them in soil clumps enriched with microbial allies that inhibit fungal growth. https://scim.ag/4nsAqCu

Very nice work from @kschlaeppi.bsky.social and co-workers. It illustrates once again the power and relevance of looking at communities in addition to individual strains > Synthetic communities of maize root bacteria interact and redirect benzoxazinoid metabolization

The poor are less able to invest in climate.

Now out: first comprehensive analysis of how the economics of #Inequality & the #Environment are interrelated. Co-author Ulrike Kornek (PIK, #UniKiel): “Implications for #climate policy."

Story, link to paper:
www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/late...

Rethinking microbial carbon use efficiency in soil models.

Hint consider microbial anatomy and physiology

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

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Soil Chemistry

🇨🇭The #ETH in #Zürich is looking for an Assistant Professor in #Soil (Bio-/Geo-) Chemistry!

Deadline to apply is September 30th!

Please Share!

#AcademicSky #Biochemistry #biogeochemistry #soilscience

ethz.ch/en/the-eth-z...

Looking for uniformly ¹³C-labeled leaf or root litter (any plant) for an upcoming incubation experiment. If you have access and are open to collaboration, let's talk!

Taylor’s law predicts unprecedented pulses of forest disturbance under global change - Nature Communications Large pulses of disturbance have been observed globally in response to climate change. Using Taylor’s Law, the authors show that those pulses were not unpredictable but expected given a strong scaling...

Taylor’s law predicts unprecedented pulses of forest disturbance under global change | Nature Communications share.google/tGonDK25Iymd...

The epitome of an innovative idea: applying Taylor's Law to understanding the variability of disturbance events in forests. Important paper!

Soil fungi influence the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality - Nature Communications Fungal diversity is critical for ecosystem functioning, yet its role in mediating the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality remains unclear. This study finds that funga...

Soil fungi influence the relationship between plant diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality

manipulating plant species richness/soil fungal diversity in 190 plant communities => measuring 10 ecosystem functions

-in @natcomms.nature.com

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

Maybe next time... looking forward to reading the outcome soon. :)

This is the one. :)

I wish I knew about this workshop earlier and had a chance to participate.:/

Following Franciska's protocol. 😂😂

So cool. So many known faces. Excited to know what comes out. Here to root exudates we have recently collected in one of our very large experiments.

Congratulations Bala...🥳🥳

📣Calling all Legume Researchers 📣

We are now accepting papers for our special issue on "Legumes in Science & Practice" 🫘🌱

📆 Deadline: 20th November

To find out more & submit: tinyurl.com/AnnalsAB

#legumes #biodiversity #nitrogenfixation #plantscience

I am not officially part of the summer school, but I reached out, and thanks to @CarolynGorres, I was welcomed as an online participant. Grateful for this spirit of inclusivity in science! 🌍🧪 #InclusiveScience #Gratitude

Very happy to finally see Annals of Applied Biology @annalsapplbio.bsky.social on here. Finally there will be a place from where we can share our publications with Academic BSky!

Welcome to BSky, new social media team :)

Earth, Life and Environmental Sciences - University of Bologna

One month left to apply for a PhD position in my group on the ERC funded project EcoMEMO.

Link to the PhD course and application: unibo.it/en/study/phd...

Please contact me if you need more info on the project, the group and life in Italy in general.

More info below⬇️

New in Geoderma: "Low-quality straw over high-quality straw preferred for mineral-associated organic matter formation" by Xiaofang Ji, Dengchun Xing, Xin Guan, Yugang Wang, Gilles Colinet & Wenting Feng. doi.org/10.1016/j.ge...

a young boy in a white tank top and red shorts is standing in a car . ALT: a young boy in a white tank top and red shorts is standing in a car .

A bittersweet day in the lab. One experiment crashed and burned, while another produced textbook-perfect results. That's science: full of setbacks and surprises. Despite a rough start, I am ending the day on a high note!

Yeah. I know how different soils may have drastic effects on soil/rhizo microbiome. But my plants are growing in one common soil & we assumed different cultivars to harbor different microbes over time. Many pots so not possible to sequence them all😟.
"It depends" makes life harder than easier.😂😂😂

I have a question: many research lines show cultivar specific microbial communities in soil. Is it always important to varify this with your own samples or just assuming it be the case would be alright? Not always possible to sequence them.

Recent OA article in @natcomms.nature.com : "Root growth and branching are enabled by brassinosteroid-regulated growth anisotropy and carbon allocation" rdcu.be/ekTAM

‼️New in
@SoilBiolBiochem

authors.elsevier.com/c/1kyZz8g13f...

We show that marcescent 🍃 #leaves pre-exposed to☀️#radiation and 🌧️precipitation (common for beech and oak) #decompose quicker in 6 months than non-exposed leaves in 12 months.

@akademievedcr.bsky.social @charlesuni.cuni.cz

A More Diverse Agriculture for the Future of Our Planet — Frontiers Planet Prize Zia Mehrabi from the University of Colorado Boulder, National Champion for the USA, presents groundbreaking research from a global collaboration showing how increasing on-farm diversity improves both ...

Great to see our paper on diversified agricultural systems, published in Science, selected as a 2025 national Frontiers Planet Prize champion!

This global dataset was curated by an amazing team of researchers working in agriculture and sustainability.

www.frontiersplanetprize.org/news/nsh4fah...

We are hiring!

Looking for 2 motivated PhD students within a joint @dfg.de
project between Ulm University (research team of Steven Jansen) and my team at TUM

Application deadline 30 April 2025 (CV and a cover letter ).

We are digging into how barley domestication shaped root and rhizosphere traits. Just look at those stunning roots! 🌾. I will be displaying some preliminary results at #Rhizosphere6 conf.
@wild-roots.bsky.social @mvanderheijden.bsky.social @ @cathepreece.bsky.social @barleymicrobreed.bsky.social

Congratulations!!!
. On a side not, Michael got a make over. :)

Anyone from the James Hutton Institute attending #Rhizosphere6? I could use some help and would love to connect! Please reach out.

5 relative abundance plots arranged to have increasing compositional variability (variability across relative abundance samples, here vertical bars)

1/ Hey y'all, I'm excited to share my latest paper, which is out now in PNAS! We introduce FAVA, a statistical framework to measure compositional variability across microbiome samples. If you want to measure variability across a stacked bar plot, FAVA is for you! Paper: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...