All bacteria are not born E. coli: Incorporating physiological measurements and genomic signatures of efficiency into soil carbon models

Individual-based biogeochemical models are becoming increasingly computationally feasible, but the scale of data collection for microbial ecology has not historically been suitable for this kind of analysis. To overcome this shortcoming, we are collecting data on the factors driving the ratio of assimilatory:dissimilatory processes in individual microbial taxa. We are linking this phenotypic data to genotypic features using phylogenetically corrected regressions. These relationships are being used in a genomically-explicit version of DEMENT to evaluate whether knowledge of the genes present in a community can shrink the difference between observed and expected soil carbon stocks.