DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Characterizing the evolution of bacterial resource use of competing protists

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Explaining the biodiversity on Earth is a puzzle that engages a broad spectrum of disciplines. The heart of the puzzle rests with evolutionary biologists, who investigate the origins of diversity, and ecologists, who ask how diversity is maintained. The goal of this project is to understand how ecology and evolution interact to allow species to coexist over time. It will provide the investigators with access to new research skills and methods, resulting in exciting experimental evidence of how competitors evolve. By participating in this research, undergraduate students will learn how to develop their own research questions, design appropriate experiments, and complete data analyses. This training will extend to high school students through a program that allows students to design and perform experiments under the guidance of an online mentor. The investigators will develop curriculum resources that meet Florida's high school standards, particularly those that address evolution and evolutionary principles. Through these contributions, the project will stimulate students to think critically about evolution in an exploratory manner that they find both fun and interesting.This project will use high-throughput next-generation sequencing of bacteria to characterize shifts in resource use as a consequence of evolution in competing protists. Bacterial stock cultures will initially be grown with and without protists to determine which bacterial taxa are most affected by each species. These bacterial communities are expected to contain hundreds of species; non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis will be used to visualize the resource niche of each protist species. Subsequent to two weeks, or about 50 generations of evolution, the resource niche of each species will be characterized again to demonstrate shifts in diet as a result of evolution. The researchers predict that protists will evolve to diverge in consumption of bacterial resources unless they are constrained from doing so by alternate selection pressures, in which case the researchers predict species will converge in resource use. This work will demonstrate how ecological and evolutionary forces interact among species competing for resources.