Practical benefits of biochar amendment to agricultural systems: Linking soil and microbial processes to economic feasibility and sustainability

Dr. Pentons lab at Arizona State University will conduct research investigating bacterial, fungal and functional gene targeted community structure from field and incubation experiments. This includes, but is not limited to the extraction of DNA from soil samples, amplification of target genes, sequencing on the Illumina MiSeq platform, bioinformatic analyses of resulting data and manuscript generation. Quantitative PCR will also be conducted using custom primers targeting functional genes involved in C and N cycling for application to the Wafergen microfluidic system. Both sequencing and quantitative data will be correlated to soil/biochar physiochemical measurements in order to derive factors that most influence community structure and functional abundances. Dr. Penton will support one graduate student, Julian Yu, under this project.