Winter-is-coming

But do soil microorganisms know and prepare accordingly?

Project manager (PI): Andrea Söllinger

Project description:

Microorganisms—invisibly to our naked eyes—quietly run the Earth’s life support system. Among many so-called ecosystem services they provide, they produce oxygen for us to breathe and recycle nutrients for plants to grow. Furthermore, microorganisms are not as simple and primitive as we often depicture them and they continue to surprise us. For example, scientists studying the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus could show that these microbes measure day length and use this information to prepare for seasonal change. Or in other words, these microbes are not simply reacting to changing environmental conditions, such as decreasing temperature when autumn changes to winter, but they notice the shorter days and prepare themselves for the decreasing temperatures - ensuring their survival under wintry conditions. The key for S. elongatus to measure photoperiod is their circadian clock, a molecular mechanism that synchronizes the microbes’ activities to 24-h day-night cycles. Circadian clocks are very widespread internal timekeepers that, for example, control sleep, growth, and metabolism. These clocks are found in humans, animals, plants, fungi, and the closer we look the more examples we also find among microbes, including soil microbes.

Our project Winter-is-coming raises the question of whether soil microbes also use their circadian clocks and photoperiodic information—information about the length of day and night in a 24-hour period—to prepare for critical seasonal transitions, such as the autumn to winter transition. In the context of soil ecology, answering this question may have dramatic implications as climate change is increasing autumn temperatures, leading to a mismatch between temperature and day length. This mismatch may threaten soil ecosystem services provided by microbes such as soil carbon storage and nutrient recycling, which in turn affects soil health, plant growth, and greenhouse gas emissions from soils

Winter-is-coming team:

Core project team @ UiT: 

Andrea Söllinger (PI), Alexander West (co-lead), Hannah Bornemann (research technician)

SHRINK collaborators @ UiT:

Laura Jaakola, Wojciech Leoniuk, Alexander T. Tveit, Tilman Schmider

Financial/grant information:

Research Council of Norway (Radical Research Ideas for Early Career Scientists) - 362017 Winter-is-coming. 

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Contact: Andrea Söllinger (andrea.soellinger@uit.no)

Last updated, April 2026