Year: 2020-21

Company: Soil Carbon Co.

Liaison(s): Abed Chaudhury, Raghvendra Sharma

The Soil Carbon Company focuses on developing tools that help farmers restore carbon to their soil. They believe that global warming could be significantly ameliorated through improved agricultural crop management utilizing fungi to sequester carbon and fortify soil. The company’s mission is to simultaneously address both agricultural productivity and atmospheric carbon dioxide reduction through the development of products that will capture carbon from the atmosphere and return it to the soil.
SoilCarbon has identified a number of microbial organisms with the potential to increase carbon sequestration in soil. To leverage their investment in these microbes, SoilCarbon aims to explore and identify key components of the microbial genomes.
The SoilC TMP team was tasked with assembling genomic sequences of unknown and potentially novel microbial genomes and investigate biochemical pathway-related genes involved in carbon assimilation. To accomplish this objective, the TMP team conducted a series of short read genome sequence assemblies for 20 eukaryotic genomes, discovered genome-wide open reading frames and conducted phylogenetic analysis to establish the novelty of the findings. Predicted proteins were further analyzed for the conservation of defined structural domains and motifs and potential novel enzymes were modeled. The data collected and analyzed on these microbes are confidential to Soil Carbon Co. In light of this, we have provided a report that details our analytical methodology, including various machine learning algorithms, and the analytical pipeline.