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The world faces two seemingly unrelated challenges—a shortfall in the STEM workforce and increasing antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens. We address these two challenges with Tiny Earth, an undergraduate research course that excites students about science and creates a pipeline for antibiotic discovery.

Salt marshes located on the east coast of temperate North America are highly productive, typically nitrogen-limited, and support diverse assemblages of free-living nitrogen fixing (diazotrophic) bacteria. This article reviews and analyzes data from North Inlet estuary (SC, USA), addressing diazotroph assemblage structure and the influence of plant host and environmental conditions on the assemblage. The North Inlet estuary is a salt marsh ecosystem in which anthropogenic influences are minimal and the distributions of diazotrophs are governed by the natural biota and dynamics of the system. Denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis fingerprinting and phylogenetic analyses of recovered sequences demonstrated that the distributions of some diazotrophs reflect plant host specificity and that diazotroph assemblages distributed across marsh gradients are also heavily influenced by edaphic conditions. Broadly distributed diazotrophs that are capable of maintaining populations under all environmental conditions spanning such gradients are also present in these assemblages. Statistical analyses indicate that the structures of diazotroph assemblages in different vegetation zones are significantly (p < 0.01) different. New data presented here demonstrate the heterogeneity of salt marsh rhizosphere microenvironments, and corroborate previous findings from different plant hosts growing at several locations within this estuary. The data from these collected works support the hypothesis that the biogeography of microorganisms is non-random and these biogeographic patterns are predictable.

Drought has many consequences in the tidally dominated Spartina sp. salt marshes of the southeastern US; including major dieback events, changes in sediment chemistry and obvious changes in the landscape. These coastal systems tend to be highly productive, yet many salt marshes are also nitrogen limited and depend on plant associated diazotrophs as their source of ‘new’ nitrogen. A 4-year study was conducted to investigate the structure and composition of the rhizosphere diazotroph assemblages associated with 5 distinct plant zones in one such salt marsh. A period of greatly restricted tidal inundation and precipitation, as well as two periods of drought (June–July 2004, and May 2007) occurred during the study. DGGE of nifH PCR amplicons from rhizosphere samples, Principal Components Analysis of the resulting banding patterns, and unconstrained ordination analysis of taxonomic data and environmental parameters were conducted. Diazotroph assemblages were organized into 5 distinct groups (R2 = 0.41, p value < 0.001) whose presence varied with the environmental conditions of the marsh. Diazotroph assemblage group detection differed during and after the drought event, indicating that persistent diazotrophs maintained populations that provided reduced supplies of new nitrogen for vegetation during the periods of drought.

The world faces two seemingly unrelated challenges&mdash;a shortfall in the STEM workforce and increasing antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens. We address these two challenges with Tiny Earth, an undergraduate research course that excites students about science and creates a pipeline for antibiotic discovery.