Microbial Solutions to Climate Change: Systems-Level Insights into Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Climate change driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily CO2, CH4, and N2O, poses one of the most urgent global challenges. Microbial communities play pivotal but underappreciated roles in regulating GHG fluxes across terrestrial, aquatic, and engineered ecosystems. From methanotrophs in wetlands and rice paddies to nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria in soils and wastewater systems, microorganisms mediate critical steps in carbon, nitrogen, and methane cycling. Recent advances in systems microbiology, integrating metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, and metabolic modeling, are revealing the complex ecological networks and metabolic pathways that control GHG production and consumption.This Research Topic aims to explore how systems level approaches can advance our understanding of GHG mitigating microbial communities and translate these insights into actionable climate solutions. We seek contributions that go beyond descriptive amplicon surveys to provide mechanistic, functional, and translational perspectives on microbial GHG mitigation. We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to:• Multi omics approaches (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics) to dissect GHG cycling pathways. • Metabolic modeling and systems biology of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide metabolism. Microbial interactions and syntrophy in GHG producing and consuming communities. • Environmental and anthropogenic drivers of GHG flux dynamics. Engineering microbial communities for enhanced GHG removal (e.g., methane oxidation, CO2 fixation, N2O reduction). • Microbiome based interventions in agriculture (e.g., rice paddies, livestock systems, fertilizer management). • Climate change feedbacks on microbial GHG cycling (warming, drought, permafrost thaw).In line with the section’s policy, purely descriptive amplicon based studies (16S rRNA, 18S rRNA, ITS profiling) without functional, mechanistic, or translational insight fall outside the scope and will be desk rejected or transferred as appropriate. Topic editors: Subhasree Ray, Serena Moseman-Valtierra, Dr. Kuppam Chandrasekhar, Prasun Kumar Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81793/microbial-solutions-to-climate-change-systems-level-insights-into-greenhouse-gas-mitigation