In the broadest terms our research program focuses on issues that relate to soil microbial diversity: its extent, its regulation, and its impact on biogeochemical cycles that regulate soil fertility and ecosystem function. Since the vast majority of microorganisms continue to resist efforts at enrichment and cultivation we use molecular and genomic techniques to study microorganisms in

situ, supplemented supplemented by experiments with pure and mixed cultures to examine linkages between genome composition, microbial physiology, and environmental activity.