Soil scientist involves students in nematode research
Amy Treonis and her students study organisms in soil, like this handful she's holding from the woods behind Gottwald Center for the Sciences.BY JOAN TUPPONCE
It’s not the desert beauty that draws Department of Biology assistant professor Amy Treonis to Death Valley National Park; it’s the desert soil, home to several species of microscopic roundworms called nematodes.
“Deserts are great places to study ecology because they are an extreme environment,” Treonis explains. “Death Valley has a lot of variation in elevation, from 200 feet below sea level to 8,000 feet above sea level.”
Treonis’ interest in soil biology dates back to her youth when she would often play in the dirt in her mom’s community garden plot.
“We would dig up vegetables or make dirt castles,” she recalls. “I like seeing bugs in soil. I guess girls and worms don’t exactly go together, but scientists don’t fit stereotypes.”
Treonis decided to study environmental science in graduate school after working with a professor on microbiology research during her undergraduate years at Dominican University.
“That’s where I learned about bacteria,” she says.
At the University of Illinois at Chicago she focused her work on soil and how it would affect global climate change.
“Soils have a role in determining the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which determines global temperature,” Treonis explains. “My first project in graduate school was looking at what would happen to plants and soil organisms when there is a raised carbon dioxide concentration.”
Soil is filled with different organisms. Some, such as earthworms, are easy to see. Others, such as nematodes, are not visible to the naked eye.
“The organisms that you can’t see really compose the bulk of the diversity in soil,” Treonis explains.
A handful of soil contains millions of individual organisms. Most are bacteria and other single cell organisms, but some are multi-cellular animals.
“Their job is to decompose things and turn them into something that plants can use,” she explains. “Bacteria take complex molecules and turn them back to carbon dioxide. It goes full circle.”
Treonis came to Richmond in 2005 after teaching at Creighton University in Omaha for four years. The majority of her research centers on basic nematode biology.
“There’s a lot that we don’t understand about nematodes,” she says. “One of the problems is that they are microscopic. They are also very diverse.”
Treonis has received a grant from the Virginia-based Jeffress Foundation to look at the feeding preference of one specific group of nematodes. She and her students are studying the nematodes in field plots at the USDA agricultural field station in Beltsville, Md.
According to Treonis, there are more than 20,000 species of the multi-cellular animals on earth. The nematodes that live in soils are mostly the “good guys” of the group. The “bad guys” are plant parasites that can cause billions of dollars of loss when they infect crops.
“The entire surface of the plant is covered with nematodes,” she says. “Most of them are from the benign group of nematodes. They eat bacteria or fungi. Some eat other nematodes.”
Tim McLlarky, ’10, works in Treonis’ lab, helping to characterize the bacterial communities from different locations within Death Valley National Park.
“I like doing the bacterial stuff because it shows the wide diversity of microbes that we live with,” he says. “I also like to see the nematodes in action under the microscope.”
McLlarky says Treonis “expects us to be able to be independent and to get our research done, but she is always very helpful and involved with our research. The fact that she is so understanding motivates me to go in and get more work done.”
Oliver Hill Scholar Jasmine Felder, ’10, helps extract nematode DNA from soil samples collected from Death Valley. She admits she knew little about nematodes before working with Treonis.
“As the semester has progressed, I have become more and more fascinated by them,” she says. “I feel the research is important because nematodes play a vital role in soil richness and can be very useful in maintaining a healthy environment.”
Felder appreciates the fact that Treonis is willing to give her a helping hand when she needs it. “When I first started working in this lab, I thought I would never catch on to all the new skills and techniques I was learning,” she says. “But now after a semester of working with Dr. Treonis, I am able to walk into the lab and do everything I need to do with no problem. I’ve learned so much during this semester, and I owe a lot of that to Dr. Treonis.”
Treonis also learns from her students, especially when they ask novel questions that require research.
“I’m building new knowledge, and I’m taking students with me when I am doing that,” she says. “That’s important. I like to get them involved in the whole process.”