MSB: Insights Into Mutualistic Interactions Between Free-Living, Pleomorphic Spirochetes (FLiPS) and Obligate Dechlorinators (Dehalococcoides)

MSB：深入了解自由生活的多形螺旋体 (FLiPS) 和专性脱氯菌 (Dehalococcoides) 之间的相互作用

• 批准号: 0919251
• 负责人: Frank Loeffler
• 金额: $ 44.64万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-11-01 至 2010-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0919251&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: MSB; Insights; Into; Mutualistic; Interactions

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Soil, sediment and subsurface environments harbor a tremendous diversity of microbes, and a major research goal is to better understand how such complex systems evolve, function, and respond to environmental changes. The reductionist approaches that focused on individual bacterial populations provided a wealth of valuable information, usually under simplified conditions, but to truly understand how complex microbial communities function, the interactions and interdependencies between different populations inhabiting the same environment must be explored. The premise of this proposal is that many bacteria engage in unknown interactions with neighboring organisms, and that these interspecies links can be characterized using microbiological and genome-enabled approaches. Dehalococcoides and free-living, pleomorphic spirochetes (FLiPS) are members of natural river sediment and aquifer microbial communities. Dehalococcoides are highly specialized bacteria that gain energy for growth by removing halogen substituents from many hydrocarbons, including priority pollutants. This process is called organohalide respiration, and as the bacteria breathe halogenated hydrocarbons (just like we breathe air), the contaminants are detoxified. Dehalococcoides bacteria grow very poorly in isolation but perform robustly in mixed cultures when FLiPS are present. Conversely, FLiPS benefit from Dehalococcoides, and a major goal of the project is to explore the biomolecular basis of these microbe-microbe interactions. This project will characterize unexplored microbe-microbe interactions (symbiosis) at the fundamental, molecular level and shed light on the evolutionary mechanisms that lead to beneficial interactions between distinctly different microbial populations. This research project will generate new understanding on how microbe-microbe interactions develop, operate, and persist, while affecting specific functions of the community (e.g., detoxification of halogenated hydrocarbons). This project will not only advance knowledge of Dehalococcoides and spirochete biology, but will further improve our predictive ability how microbial communities function and respond to perturbations. Two doctoral students and three summer undergraduate students from the University of Puerto Rico will engage in this research effort.

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。土壤，沉积物和地下环境中含有大量的微生物，主要研究目标是更好地了解这些复杂系统如何进化，功能和应对环境变化。 还原论方法专注于单个细菌种群，通常在简化的条件下提供了大量有价值的信息，但要真正了解复杂的微生物群落如何发挥作用，必须探索居住在同一环境中的不同种群之间的相互作用和相互依赖性。 这一提议的前提是，许多细菌与邻近的生物体进行未知的相互作用，并且这些种间联系可以使用微生物学和基因组使能的方法来表征。 Dehalococcoides和自由生活的多形性螺旋体（FLiPS）是天然河流沉积物和含水层微生物群落的成员。 Dehalococcoides是一种高度特化的细菌，通过从许多碳氢化合物（包括优先污染物）中去除卤素取代基来获得生长所需的能量。 这个过程被称为有机卤化物呼吸，当细菌呼吸卤代烃（就像我们呼吸空气一样）时，污染物被解毒。 Dehalococcoides细菌在隔离中生长非常差，但当FLiPS存在时，在混合培养物中表现强劲。 相反，FLiPS受益于Dehalococcoides，该项目的主要目标是探索这些微生物-微生物相互作用的生物分子基础。 该项目将在基本的分子水平上表征未探索的微生物-微生物相互作用（共生），并揭示导致明显不同的微生物种群之间有益相互作用的进化机制。 该研究项目将产生关于微生物-微生物相互作用如何发展，运作和持续的新认识，同时影响社区的特定功能（例如，卤化烃的解毒）。 该项目不仅将推进脱卤球菌和螺旋体生物学的知识，还将进一步提高我们对微生物群落如何发挥作用和对扰动做出反应的预测能力。 来自波多黎各大学的两名博士生和三名暑期本科生将参与这项研究工作。