Erinne Stirling

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO

Soils associated with wet and ephemerally wet environments, i.e. wet soils, cover an area greater than 12.1 million km2; inland wetlands deliver at least Int$27.0 trillion in tangible and intangible benefits. However, due to their intimate association with wet environments, wet soils are at risk of degradation during drought events. This review inv...

Viruses are crucial in shaping soil microbial functions and ecosystems. However, studies on soil viromes have been limited in both spatial scale and biome coverage. Here we present a comprehensive synthesis of soil virome biogeographic patterns using the Global Soil Virome dataset (GSV) wherein we analysed 1,824 soil metagenomes worldwide, uncoveri...

Seed endophytic microbiomes are shaped by host and environmental factors and play a crucial role in their host growth and health. Studies have demonstrated that host genotype, including hybridization, affects seed microbiomes. Heterosis features are also observed in root-associated microbiomes. It remains unclear, however, whether heterosis exists...

Cell size is a key morphological trait which is associated with microbial activity and nutrient acquisition. However, it is still unclear whether bacteria of different sizes have similar structural and functional properties. In this study, we sorted bacterial cells into five size classes (small, slightly small, medium, slightly large, large) using...

Human activities have long impacted the health of Earth's rivers and lakes. These inland waters, crucial for our survival and productivity, have suffered from contamination which allows the formation and spread of antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs) and consequently, ARG-carrying pathogens (APs). Yet, our global understanding of waterborne pathogen a...

Antibiotic overuse and the subsequent environmental contamination of residual antibiotics poses a public health crisis via an acceleration in the spread of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) through horizontal gene transfer. Although the occurrence, distribution, and driving factors of ARGs in soils have been widely investigated, little is known ab...

The phyllosphere provides a habitat for a large sum of microorganisms which are modulated by numerous biotic and abiotic factors. While it is logical that host lineage must have some effect on the phyllosphere habitat, it is unclear if phyllospheres harbor similar microbial core communities across multiple ecosystems at the continental-scale. Here...

Arsenic (As) is the most ubiquitous toxic metalloid in nature. Microbe-mediated As metabolism plays an important role in global As biogeochemical processes, greatly changing its toxicity and bioavailability. While metagenomic sequencing may advance our understanding of the As metabolism capacity of microbial communities in different environments, a...

Freshwater microorganisms and their interactions are important drivers of nutrient cycling that are in turn affected by nutrient status, causing shifts in microbial community diversity, composition, and interactions. However, the impact of water trophic status on bacterial-archaeal interdomain interactions remains poorly understood. This study focu...

The intensive use of chemical fertilizer, particularly nitrogen (N) has resulted in not only markedly increased crop yields but also detrimental effects on ecosystems. Plant microbiomes represent an eco-friendly alternative for plant nutrition and productivity, and the effect of N fertilization on plant and soil microbes has been well studied. Howe...

Soil microbial community rhythms are a foundational mechanism that underpins soil microbial ecological processes, but evidence of endogenous circadian rhythms in these communities which are regulated by microbial molecular oscillations is lacking. In this study we used soil total and potentially active microbial communities to explore endogenous ci...

Arsenic (As) is the most ubiquitous toxic metalloid in nature. Microbe mediated As metabolism plays an important role in the global As biogeochemical processes, greatly changing its toxicity and bioavailability. While metagenomic sequencing may advance our understanding of the As metabolism capacity of microbial communities in different environment...

Introduction Assembly and co-occurrence of the host co-evolved microbiota are essential ecological and evolutionary processes, which is not only crucial for managing individual plant fitness but also ecological function. However, understanding of the microbiome assembly and co-occurrence in higher plants is not well understood. The tea plant was sh...

Soil science is an inherently diverse and multidisciplinary subject that cannot develop further without the continuous introduction and promotion of emerging technologies. One such technology that is widely used in biomedicine and similar research fields, microfluidics, poses significant benefits for soil research; however, this technology is still...

Root-microbiome interactions are of central importance for plant performance and yield. A distinctive feature of legumes is that they engage in symbiosis with N 2-fixing rhizobia. If and how the rhizobial symbiotic capacity modulates root-associated microbiomes are still not yet well understood. We determined root-associated microbiomes of soybean...

Small ponds have become a hotspot of greenhouse gas emissions, but our understanding of methane (CH4) cycling and its biological regulation in small polluted ponds remains limited. To assess how pollution affects CH4 content, we investigated dissolved CH4 concentrations, water and sediments properties, methanogenic and methanotrophic communities in...

Background: Co-occurrence pattern provides vital insight into complex microbial interactions of microbiomes. Although network analysis offers useful tools for describing microbial co-occurrence pattern, evolution of co-occurrence networks remains largely uncharacterized. Here, we simulated the evolution of the Earth microbial co-occurrence network...

Earth is the cradle of mankind, but it is impossible for human beings to live in the cradle forever. Sending soil microbial spores through space to foreign planets will be a likely initial process in planet colonization. Periods of hyper-gravity are likely to be a challenge for the candidate microorganisms during their interstellar transportation,...

Soil biogeochemical cycles and their interconnections play a critical role in regulating functions and services of environmental systems. However, the coupling of soil biogeochemical processes with their mediating microbes remains poorly understood. Here, we identified key microbial taxa regulating soil biogeochemical processes by exploring biomark...

Revealing the effects of spatial heterogeneity on microorganisms is crucial for the further understanding of microbial diversity, turnover and ecological processes. However, microbial community assembly and the factors that shape it are still unknown at a centimeter scale. To address this gap, we conducted variation partitioning and null model anal...

Microbial community circadian rhythms have a broad influence on host health and even though light-induced environmental fluctuations could regulate microbial communities, the contribution of light to the circadian rhythms of rhizosphere microbial communities has received little attention. To address this gap, we monitored diel changes in the microb...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake.

Microbiomes across the entire planet connect numerous microorganisms to one another, but how are these communities themselves connected across the globe? To find out, researchers recently analyzed the massive Earth Microbiome Project dataset, which pools data about microbial life from around the world. The result was a planet-sized co-occurrence ne...

The isolation chip method (iChip) provides a novel approach for culturing previously uncultivable microorganisms; this method is currently limited by the user being unable to ensure single-cell loading within individual wells. To address this limitation, we integrated flow cytometry-based fluorescence-activated cell sorting with a modified iChip (F...

Background: Revealing the effects of multi-dimensional spatial distribution on microorganisms is crucial for the further understanding of microbial diversity, turnover and ecological processes. However, microbial community assembly and the factors that shape it are still unknown from a three dimensional (3D) perspective. Here, a 3D model was create...

Background: Root-microbiome interactions are of central importance for plant performance and yield. A distinctive feature of legumes in this context is that they engage in symbiosis with rhizobia, which are abundant in soils and include both symbiotic and non-symbiotic bacterial strains. If and how the capacity of rhizobia to form symbiosis modulat...

Background: Microbial interactions shape the structure and function of microbial communities; microbial co-occurrence networks in specific environments have been widely developed to explore these complex systems, but their interconnection pattern across microbiomes in various environments at the global scale remains unexplored. Here, we have infer...

Background : Plant microbiome plays an important role in promoting plant health and production. However, even though the microbiomes in various compartments have been widely investigated, the association across plant compartments from soil to leaf remain unclear. Tea is a globally popular beverage due to its flavor and health benefits associating w...

Post-fire litter layers are composed of leaves and woody debris that predominantly fall during or soon after the fire event. These layers are distinctly different to pre-fire litters due to their common origin and deposition time. However, heterogeneity can arise from the variable thermal conditions in the canopy during fire. Therefore, in this stu...

As climate change proceeds, a change in the frequency and intensity of fire events is expected to affect soil organic matter (SOM) transformations within forestry systems. A likely consequence is the development of post-fire litter layers composed of thermally altered non-senescent materials that have fallen during a fire event. In this study, Pinu...

Under conditions of increased fire season length and area affected by fire, stocks of carbon stored in forests are at increased risk of burning. While much research has investigated the immediate loss of above ground and below ground carbon stocks through combustion during a fire, there has been little research on subsequent organic matter cycling...

In pine forest litters, decomposition rate is directly affected by the pathway the needle followed to the ground, whether that was via programmed apoptosis and abscission or via stress induced loss through branch damage or tree death. Stress induced losses may occur due to fire damage, which leads to a post-fire litter layer composed of non-senesce...

There are few continuous Australian palaeoclimate records that extend beyond the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), meaning that knowledge of regional climates before, during and after this period is limited. Understanding late-Pleistocene climates of the subtropics is important because of the fundamental role the region plays in the large-scale, global t...