Brian Lanoil, Ph.D., B.A.

Email

lanoil@ualberta.ca

Phone

(780) 248-1452

Address

M-458 Bio Science - Microbiology Wing

11355 - Saskatchewan Drive

Edmonton AB

T6G 2E9

Dr. Lanoil talks about his research with ice cores and the Canadian Ice Core Archive

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My interests fall into the broad area of microbial ecology and microbiology of extreme environments. The principle systems I study include:

1. Microbiology of icy arctic environments

The vast majority of Earth’s biosphere exists in permanently cold environments, including polar regions (14% of surface area) and deep ocean (90% by volume). Microorganisms are often the sole or dominant (both numerically and in terms of biomass) inhabitants of widespread cold environments such as subglacial systems, high arctic tundra soils, ice cores, and sub-ice marine environments. These environments are particularly susceptible to climate change as they are often poised between frozen and unfrozen states. Previous work in our lab has focused on glacial, proglacial, and subglacial microbiology; Arctic soils; and sea ice microbiology. Current projects in the laboratory in this area include:

a. Response of microbial communities to thawing permafrost

b. Using permafrost as an archive to reconstruct microbial community responses to past climate change

2. Microbiology of soil health

Our focus is on using the high resilience and rapid adaptation of microbial communities to disturbance to help determine optimal methods for regenerative agriculture and improving soil health. We are looking for interested partners and students to pursue this research. Our current projects involve examining soils from around Alberta to determine the impact of agricultural processes (e.g. tillage, synthetic fertilizer application, crop type) on microbial community structure and function, and using those changes to help determine soil health.

The methods that we use in my laboratory are both traditional microbiology and (meta)genomics based, although the emphasis is on non-culture based methods. Some of the main approaches we use include:

A. 16S rRNA gene based diversity analyses (via high-throughput sequencing)
B. Metagenomics
C. Stable isotope probing

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Developing seasonal multi-layer network models to evaluate cumulative impacts on Arctic ecosystems from ArcticNet on Vimeo.

Dr. Lanoil is a co-investigator on this project supported by ArcticNet, a Centre of Networks of Excellence. His collaborators on this project are Dr. Suzanne Tank (U. Alberta, Biological Sciences), Dr. Milla Rautio (UQAC), Dr. Warwick Vincent (Laval University), and Dr. Connie Lovejoy (Laval University)