Building Concepts for Succession: Indentifying Mechanisms for Ectomycorrhizal Fungus Succession and Developing Undergraduate Education/Research Opportunities

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Communities of plants and fungi establish in severely disturbed sites (e.g. glacier forelands, volcanic deposit areas) in a fairly well described order of succession. Succession and its mechanisms are focal areas in ecology and a number of ecological theories explain the succession-related community change of plants and fungi. This proposal rests on a succession model for fungi that adopts from community assembly rules, which can be described as a set of admission rules that allow arrival and persistence of organisms in any ecosystem. The main goal of this program is to identify and assess the sources of organisms in a glacier forefront ecosystem and to identify the organisms that comprise the living (metabolically active fungal communities). To study this idea, we will employ novel molecular tools that focus on the protein-synthesizing ribosomes and the DNA that encodes them. Use of direct, simultaneous analysis of ribosomal RNA (rRNA; the building block of ribosomes) and the genes (rDNA) that encode rRNA will allow determining which organisms are present in early and late successional environments (present as rDNA) and which of them are active (present as both rRNA and rDNA). This proposal will experimentally assess sources of fungi in an assembly model for fungal succession. The proposed research will improve our understanding of the mechanisms behind the community change of fungi. The results will likely to be relevant as a background for planning restoration and conservation programs.