Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Mar 26

SoilBioME the amazing team I'm a part of now has socials! We are on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/soil... www.instagram.com/soilbiome/, and Instagram and our BlueSky TBA. Follow us for updates from Serita Frey, @stuartsoil.bsky.social, Jessica Ernakovich, and Alix Contosta's groups.

LinkedIn Login, Sign in | LinkedIn

Login to LinkedIn to keep in touch with people you know, share ideas, and build your career.

www.linkedin.com

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 23

Both of these have been such easy wins. They will make life easier for me and my labmates and save us so much money in both materials and person-time. These small win-win-wins are what I need right now.

1

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 23

Thing 2:
96-well plate washer

Cost:
$2 in plastic
$15 for a pack of 14 gauge cannulae (not pictured)
20 minutes of my time

Commercial cost: $8000

1 3

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 23

Thing 1: Magnetic bead plate for library prep.

Cost:
$1.50 for plastic
$30 for magnets and their shipping +
20 minutes of my time including: finding the pattern, walking to the maker space, uploading the design, collecting the printed design and putting in the magnets.

Commercial cost: $1106.65

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 23

One way I'm trying to stay sane in all this madness is small, daily dopamine boosts. In the last 3 weeks it's been making friends with folks at the maker space in the campus building nextdoor and printing small tools for the lab from thingyverse that are normally obscenely expensive.

1 6

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

Finally: This paper would not have been possible without close collaboration (weekly meetings for 4 yrs!) between the co-first authors: Our expertise included metabolism, community ecology, cutting-edge bioinformatics. We had further collaborations with biogeochemists, and ecosystem ecologists.

4

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

Ultimately this paper raises important questions for ecology at a time when Anthropocene-Earth faces its most purturbed-state to date: What are the conditions of stability? When do these "stable states in an unstable landscape" hit their tipping points and can we predict it?

1 3

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

And the kicker: Some of those generalists are better indicators of the isotopic composition of methane than methanogens themselves!

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

We were able to show through multi-layer network modeling that strong subcommunities of generalists helped bouy vulnerable specialists from changing conditions, and possibly also help provide nitrogen sources for them.

A figure from the paper showing a subnetwork of generalists (red) that surround a prominent methanogen (M. Stordalenmirensis - blue). The generalists show persistent correlations to methane composition, in some cases stronger than those of the methanogen itself.

1 3

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

Luckily, because we had so much multi-layered 'omics and biogeochemical data, we were able to tease apart likely reasons for the stability of microbes in each thaw stage habitat: Functional redundancy and possible community 'rescue' through high dispersal rates in a water-logged habitat.

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

We grappled with the definition of stability, and how and when it applied. We also looked at other long-term studies to try to determine if our findings were unique, or if this was a general rule of microbial communities. (I lean towards the general rule side of the debate).

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

We took a "leave-no-stone-unturned" approach: looking at organisms, functions, and community organization across multiple levels of granularity to prove to ourselves, beyond a doubt that the communities not only demonstrated resistance to change, but also hints of resilience.

A power-point slide showing two ordination plots with arrows and the title "Across time microbes are resistent to change within habitat". On the left - an ordination showing species composition, on the right, functional capacity of the microbial community. Communities bounce around within the habitat area over time, but do not exceed its bounds. This demonstrates one of the many metrics of stability that we applied in this study.

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

Next came our hardest tasks yet, 1) proving to ourselves that what we were really seeing was true 'stability' 2) trying to figure out why these communities showed such resistance to change.

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

You might notice that all of these questions revolved around a constant: change. The one thing we *didn't* expect to see was a stable community.

And yet... each line of evidence we looked into, suggested just that. A surprising stability, & resistance to change in the communities in each habitat.

1 3

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

Microbial activity is well-known for being sensitive to to temperature so we wanted to investigate how the changes over 7 years affected the microbial communities in these habitats. How had they changed? Where there any new functions? What processes where shaping their interactions?

1 2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

Stordalen Mire is underlain by permafrost which thawing rapidly, shifting the landscape from carbon-sink to potential carbon source. This carbon release is mediated by microbes that inhabit the three "canonical" habitats in the Mire that form a permafrost thaw gradient (Palsas -> Bogs -> Fens).

Mean annual temperature at Abisko Sweden over the last 100 years. The temperature starts rising around 1970 and continues to the present day.

Soil temperatures at our sampling sites at different depths show significant rise over the 7 years of the study.

1 1 5

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

I (and most of the first-authors) came late to the game on this data - we stand on the shoulders of 10+ years of giants. Each year a field team from @emerge-bii.bsky.social has painstakingly collected 'omics, biogeochemical, and carbon flux data from Stordalen Mire in Sweden.

Overview figure of the study site, a mire in sweden with two lakes to either side. A boardwalk cuts through with scientific instruments placed along it. Photo credit: Scott Saleska

Overhead shot of two scientists processing a sample core from the peatland. They squat on the side of the boardwalk. One cuts the core with a knife on a cookie sheet, while the other prepares a vial to receive the sample. Pre-labelled vials, a measuring tape, and ethanol and gloves cover the boardwalk. A cooler waits in the upper part of the photo to recieve the sample.

1 3

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 9

🚨🚨🚨 New pre-print alert: "Stable states in an unstable landscape: microbial resistance at the front line of climate change" doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Probably the most complex paper I have ever worked on. It took 4 (!) co-first authors to accomplish and literal years to decipher the story.

Stable states in an unstable landscape: microbial resistance at the front line of climate change

Microbiome responses to warming may amplify or ameliorate terrestrial carbon loss and thus are a critical unknown in predicting climate outcomes. We quantified microbial warming response over seven ye...

doi.org

1 9 19

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Feb 6

New Paper Alert: "Permafrost pore structure and its influence on microbial diversity" - Great interdisciplinary and technically challenging paper led by the talented @nate-blais.bsky.social

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

3

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Jan 13

My neighborhood and childhood home. At minute 1:20 in this video. Complete obliteration. youtu.be/_AerpEUm0Wo?...

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Jan 13

While your point stands, I want to point out that while it may seem like the same fire, the two fires are distinct, just happening at the same time and nearby. In fact residents of Altadena are feeling like they have to compete for media attention drawn by the more affluent Palisades area.

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Jan 11

Absolutely. The only good thing about not being there right now is I can help get information to those who are. (Been listening to the scanner almost non-stop the last 3 days)

1

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Jan 11

I babysat and tutored younger kids on the street. It wasn't an affluent neighborhood (despite what people say about those who live in LA suburbs), its wealth was people and love. This is what I and others who call Altadena home have truly lost. Not just homes, and physical property but community.

2

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Jan 11

stretched a volleyball net across the street. Kids played at each others houses, adults were kind and caring to all the kids on the block.

1

Hannah Holland-Moritz @hhollandmoritz.bsky.social · Jan 11

That neighborhood is still the standard of the community I aspire to live in. We had yearly block parties where neighbors would invade our kitchen for the night, marinating for tomorrow's BBQ - one man volunteered his yard for a bounce house (his kids were grown), and we...

1 1