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

解释地球上的生物多样性是一个涉及广泛学科的难题。这个谜题的核心在于研究多样性起源的进化生物学家和研究如何维持多样性的生态学家。该项目的目标是了解生态和进化如何相互作用，使物种能够长期共存。它将为研究人员提供新的研究技能和方法，从而得出令人兴奋的实验证据，证明竞争对手是如何演变的。通过参与本研究，本科生将学习如何提出自己的研究问题，设计适当的实验，并完成数据分析。这项培训将通过一个允许学生在在线导师的指导下设计和执行实验的项目扩展到高中生。调查人员将开发符合佛罗里达州高中标准的课程资源，特别是那些涉及进化论和进化原理的课程。通过这些贡献，该项目将激发学生以一种他们觉得既有趣又有趣的探索方式批判性地思考进化。该项目将使用高通量下一代细菌测序来表征竞争原生生物进化导致的资源利用变化。细菌群培养最初将在有原生生物和没有原生生物的情况下进行，以确定哪种细菌分类群受每种物种的影响最大。这些细菌群落预计包含数百种；非度量的多维尺度分析将用于可视化每个原生物种的资源生态位。两周后，即大约50代的进化，每个物种的资源生态位将再次被表征，以证明进化导致的饮食变化。研究人员预测，原生生物在消耗细菌资源方面将进化为分化，除非它们受到替代选择压力的限制，在这种情况下，研究人员预测物种将在资源利用方面趋同。这项工作将展示生态和进化力量如何在争夺资源的物种之间相互作用。

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.