Credit: Courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Image was captured with the Helios Nanolab dual-beam focused ion beam/scanning electron microscope at EMSL and was created by Alice Dohnalkova.
An intricately structured soil bacterium, less than a micron in size, makes its home on the root surface of an Arabidopsis plant. The image is from a related DOE project at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE national scientific user facility located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, to understand how carbon within the root zone impacts the diversity and function of the rhizosphere microbial community.