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As arctic temperatures rise and permafrost thaws, frozen microbes living in the soil are waking up. Frozen, the microbes hang onto whatever carbon they had stored before they went to sleep. Woken up, they can potentially release their carbon into the air as methane, which can heat the climate. Janet Jansson is studying soil microbes to understand the impact they might have on the Earth.

But the arctic isn't the only place microbes can influence the climate. Prairies and grasslands are already encountering more droughts. The microbes there have to adjust to periods of wealth and want.

"As you get more drought, the organisms start to accumulate reserve compounds and they start to become less active," Jansson said. "It's kind of like they're hoarding resources and becoming less active until it’s wet out again. Then they can feed on the things that they've accumulated during the dry period."

To get a big picture of how the microbes are interacting with each other and their environment, Jansson uses advanced tools called "omics". These molecular tools reveal the kinds of microbes that are at work, as well as the kinds of activities the microbes are engaged in. The tools also allow her to get a big picture of the complex web of communities. She is beginning to study real viruses (not fictional ones) in the permafrost and other soils, where they infect microbes, plants, or insects and have genes not typically found in viruses.

She is a member of the U.S. National Committee for Soil Science and a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and Washington State Academy of Sciences. She has served as an editor for several journals including mSystems and is a former president of the International Society for Microbial Ecology. Jansson has appeared on Science Friday, in Newsweek and other media outlets.

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