PFI-TT: Automating Soil Organic Matter Separation to Monitor Soil Carbon Sequestration

这一创新-技术转化伙伴关系项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是促进和提高土壤分析的产量，包括将土壤的轻重成分分开。这两种土壤成分具有不同的固碳能力，对干扰的敏感性不同，对植物肥力的影响也不同。因此，它们的分离是为土壤管理提供信息以减缓气候变化和维持粮食生产的关键。需要新的土壤分析产品来促进低成本、快速和准确的测试。该团队建议开发一种能够将时间密集型手动实验室方法转化为高通量自动化过程的仪器原型，从而最大限度地减少操作员时间，提高实验室一致性并减少耗材。这一拟议的工具将使对大量样本的分析成为可能，支持大规模采用管理做法，以固存土壤中的碳，提高土壤健康，并有可能产生广泛的社会和商业影响。该项目开发了一种创新的实验室仪器，可以自动将土壤分离为轻组分和重组分。土壤被认为是维持粮食生产的宝贵资源，因为它们储存了大量的碳和可循环的营养物质。然而，并非所有的土壤都是平等的，轻的成分比重的成分循环得更快。因此，组分分离是促进对土壤功能的理解和告知再生土壤管理的关键。由于缺乏快速、可靠和可重复的方法，将土壤分离成这两种组分受到限制。该团队将对一种创新仪器进行原型设计和测试，以在美国不同生态系统的大量土壤中进行这种分离。这一工具将使科学家能够研究土壤的两个不同的部分，而不是只散装土壤，加速土壤过程的科学认识的进步。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to facilitate and enhance the throughput of soil analyses, consisting of the separation of the light from the heavy components of soil. These two soil components have different capacities to sequester carbon, are differently vulnerable to disturbance, and have different impacts on plant fertility. Therefore, their separation is key to inform soil management with regard to mitigating climate change and sustaining food production. New soil analysis products are needed to facilitate low cost, fast, and accurate testing. The team proposes to prototype an instrument able to turn a time intensive, manual laboratory method into a high-throughput automatic process that minimizes operator time, increases laboratory consistency, and reduces consumables. This proposed instrument will make this analysis possible on a high number of samples, supporting the adoption at scale of management practices to sequester carbon in soil and increase soil health, with the potential for broad societal and commercial impact. This project develops an innovative laboratory instrument to automatically perform the separation of soil into light and heavy components. Soils are recognized as a valuable resource to sustain food production, because they store vast amounts of carbon and recycled nutrients. However not all soil is equal, with the light component recycling faster than the heavy. Thus, component separation is key to advancing understanding of soil function and to informing regenerative soil management. The separation of soils into these two components has been limited by the lack of a fast, reliable, and reproducible method. The team will prototype and test an innovative instrument to perform this separation across a broad number of soils spanning the different US ecosystems. This instrument will enable scientists to study soils focusing on two distinct fractions rather than bulk soil only, accelerating the advancement of the scientific understanding of soil processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.