Unearthed! The Amazing Microbiome Exposed: The Established Researcher

Most of us can identify a group of people that have influenced the direction of our careers and of our research programs. For me, a few individuals were pivotal at different stages of my research career. As an undergraduate student majoring in biology at Concordia University, my goal was to enter a medical profession rather than a career in ecology. That all changed in my final year when I was introduced to soil microbial ecology by Paul Widden. I was dazzled by the diversity of organisms that could be viewed under the microscope. I found it very interesting that we could observe only a small proportion of the organisms in the soil, for many of which we have no idea what they do. I was hooked. This was the beginning of my interest in research. With a thirst for better understanding the microbial world, I then joined Bryce Kendrick's laboratory as a graduate student to study mycology. My research focused on the ecology of mycorrhizal symbioses, but it was also a great environment for a broad training in mycology and an appreciation of the important roles of fungi as saprobes, pathogens, and mutualists. As a postdoc in Mike Allen's group in San Diego, I focused on the use and management of mycorrhizal fungi in landscape restoration and their responses to climate change. John Klironomos. Photo taken by Miranda Hart. My research up to this point was exciting, but there was one aspect to the work that I worried about: Most of the research was built on experiments with plants grown in mycorrhizal treatments and nonmycorrhizal (sterile) controls. Such an approach is powerful in evaluating the contributions of mycorrhizal fungi. However, it is also of limited relevance as the nonmycorrhizal state is not typically found for most plants in nature. Nonetheless, this was (and still is) a standard method for studying mycorrhizal symbioses by many research groups. In 1997, a big change happened in my approach to studying plant–microbe interactions. While attending the Mycological Society of America meeting in Montreal, I listened to Jim Bever talk about a simple but powerful framework on plant–soil feedback. He showed how his concept could be used to study plant and microbial effects and responses at the same time. The approach was particularly attractive because it integrated soil microbes into dynamical frameworks of plant populations, which was novel at that time. The associated methodology was simple experimentation and had no requirement for nonmycorrhizal controls. Jim and his colleagues published their discoveries in a seminal paper (Bever, J. D., K. M. Westover, and J. Antonovics. 1997. Incorporating the soil community into plant population dynamics: the utility of the feedback approach. Journal of Ecology 85:561–573). Over the following decade, the framework by Jim and his colleagues led to an explosion of research studies on topics such as population and community dynamics, multitrophic interactions, determinants of rarity and invasiveness, climate change impacts, conservation biology, and landscape reclamation, among others. In reflecting on the contribution by Jim and his colleagues and the resulting impact on my research and the entire field, I believe there lies an important lesson. Many argue that advances in soil ecology are limited by available techniques. I certainly believe this; for example, our ability to better understand the identity and functioning of soil microbes has been vastly improved with recent advances in genomic techniques. However, conceptual/theoretical contributions may be just as influential, if not more so. Jim and his colleagues were able to stretch the field of soil ecology in a way that has resulted in more powerful questions, which are leading to research studies designed to provide more profound insight.

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