Welcome!

There is no doubt about the huge importance of indigenous microorganisms for the ecological functioning and sustainable agricultural use of soils. Yet, it is still difficult to capture soil microbial diversity and adaptability to changing environmental conditions as they occur, e.g., by land use changes, application of agrochemicals, salinization, or climate change. Next-generation nucleic acid sequencing offers a great potential to collect a new quantity of information from the soil metagenome. But there must be more than quantity to broaden our view on soil ecology and soil protection.

The objective and challenge of this Symposium is to open our minds to the new potentials of next generation sequencing, to question our traditional approaches, and to explore and discuss how we can utilize those novel datasets. Which questions can we now dare to address in soil ecology and how can we approach the problems of scales to further unveil the secrets of the huge microbial diversity that we find on Earth?   

On behalf of the Johann-Heinrich von Thünen-Institute (vTI) (www.vti.bund.de) and with the support of the German Science Foundation DFG (www.dfg.de) it is my pleasure to invite you to participate at this conference and contribute your expertise to the exciting discussions at the launch of a new leap forward in soil microbiology and ecology.

Christoph C. Tebbe
Symposium organizer