Denitrification and ammonification serve as potentially competing microbial pathways for nitrite in soil, with the former leading to loss and the latter to retention of the N. The genomic traits associated with organisms encoding the genetic potential to complete one process or the other remain unclear, and it is the objective of this work to identify them. This request builds on the first iteration of NAISS 2024/23-80 in that it will be used to also study the evolutionary history of the target denitrification enzymes as part of a masters project.