K. K. Sand

This paper reconstructs microbial communities from 2-million-year-old permafrost in Greenland, finding similarities to modern thawing permafrost microbes and suggesting microbial communities may signal climate change impacts before plants and animals.

The paper shows that fragmented ancient DNA on mineral surfaces can be incorporated by bacteria, suggesting a non-random mechanism for genetic variation and evolutionary innovation.

This paper examines how eDNA taphonomy and provenance affect ecological inference from sedimentary DNA, showing that sediment mineralogy and particle loading influence DNA retention and interpretation.

This study identifies nickel-ligated proteins as the conductive core of cable bacteria's periplasmic wires, revealing a novel mechanism for long-range electron transport.

This study investigates how mineral composition affects DNA preservation in sediments using atomic force microscopy and molecular dynamics simulations.

The paper proposes that mineral-mediated horizontal gene transfer could have significantly influenced the evolution of life by facilitating genetic material exchange across environments and timescales.