Daniel H. Buckley
Soil Microbial Genomics

705 Bradfield Hall Phone: (607) 255-1716 Fax: (697) 255-8615 email: DHB28@cornell.edu web page: http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/buckley Ph.D. in Microbiology, 2000, Michigan State University B.S. in Microbiology, 1994, University of Rochester Dan Buckley, Assistant Professor of Soil Microbial Genomics, joined the Cornell faculty in 2003. Prior to joining the Crop and Soil Sciences Department he was a member of the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University where his Ph.D. research focused on the diversity and dynamics of soil microbial communities in agroecosystems. His interest in understanding how changes in microbial diversity influence ecosystem function next led him to the University of Connecticut where he studied the diversity of methanogens and sulfate reducing bacteria in relation to their metabolic activities in marine microbial mat communities. He gained additional experience in the summers of 2001, and 2002, by teaching at the Microbial Diversity course offered by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. His research program at Cornell focuses on the genomics of soil microbial communities in agronomic and terrestrial environmental systems.

Research Program My research program focuses on using environmental genomics to examine soil microbial diversity: its extent, its regulation, and its impact on biogeochemical cycles that regulate soil fertility and influence atmospheric chemistry. Since the vast majority of microorganisms continue to resist efforts at enrichment and cultivation I am using genomic techniques to study microorganisms in situ, supplemented by experiments with pure and mixed cultures to examine linkages between genome composition, microbial physiology and environmental activity. My preference is to target the activities of specific microbial assemblages, to examine how genetic and physiological diversity within a group of organisms influences the products of microbial metabolism and the consequences that the formation of metabolic products has on the environment. In addition, I am also interested in the general mechanisms that influence the evolution of microorganisms in context of the emergence and maintenance of genomic diversity in microbial communities. I believe that microbial model systems can be used to explore ecological and evolutionary processes that give rise to diversity from the scale of individual genomes to the scale of whole ecosystems.  Courses Taught CSS410: The GMO Debate: Environmental Impacts

Selected Publications Buckley, D. H. and T. M. Schmidt (In Press) Measurement of ribosomal RNA abundance by hybridization with oligonucleotide probes. In Methods for General and Molecular Microbiology. Reddy, C. A., J. A. Breznak and T. M. Schmidt (eds.). American Society for Microbiology, Washington, D.C. Buckley, D. H. and T. M. Schmidt (2003) Diversity and dynamics of microbial communities in soils from agroecosystems. Environmental Microbiology. 5:441-452. Bruns, M. A. and D. H. Buckley (2001) Isolation and purification of microbial community nucleic acids from environmental samples. In C. J. Hurst, R. L. Crawford, G. R. Knudsen, M. McInerney and L. Stetzenbach (eds.). Manual of Environmental Microbiology, 2nd Edition. American Society for Microbiology, Washington, D.C, pp. 564-572. Buckley, D. H. and T. M. Schmidt (2001) Environmental factors influencing the distribution of Verrucomicrobia in soil. FEMS Microbial Ecology. 35:105-112. Buckley, D. H. and T. M. Schmidt (2001) The structure of microbial communities in soil and the lasting impact of cultivation. Microbial Ecology. 42:11-21. Buckley, D. H. and T. M. Schmidt (2001) Exploring the diversity of soil – a microbial rainforest. In J. T. Staley and A. L. Reysenbach (eds.). Biodiversity of Microbial Life: Foundation of Earth's Biosphere. Wiley-Liss, New York, pp. 183-208.