Community processes structuring assembly and disassembly of bat gut-microbial communities across a gradient of habitat degradation

哺乳动物的肠道是微生物群落的家园，这些微生物在单个动物的营养和健康中发挥着重要作用。这些微生物群落或微生物群由数百种细菌组成，但存在哪些物种，以及它们的常见程度，因动物个体而异。这种变异性很重要，因为不正常的社区可能会导致从肥胖到抑郁症的各种情况。然而，人们对微生物群落聚集或分解的规则知之甚少。以野生蝙蝠为模型，研究人员将调查宿主的社会性、饮食、遗传学和微生物功能和相互作用如何塑造消化微生物群的组成。这项研究的结果有助于了解微生物群组成的规律，有助于促进人类和野生动物的健康。为了提高学生对科学研究是如何进行的理解，该团队将邀请全国各地的小学生参与该项目，实时分享现场数据。学生将学习如何通过研究人员的STEM K-12倡议：马来西亚蝙蝠教育冒险来分析和解释项目数据。使用现有的生物多样性模块(5-6年级)和新模块“微生物多样性：你的蝙蝠里有什么？”(6-7年级)，将向学生介绍微生物生态和多样性的主题。该计划在改变学生STEM知识、技能和态度方面的成功将通过与对照组的干预前和干预后设计中的定量方法进行评估。这项研究将确定群落过程在构建分布在栖息地退化梯度上的食虫蝙蝠物种肠道微生物组成和功能方面的相对作用。研究人员假设，微生物群落的组装和分解涉及生态位过滤、物种相互作用和扩散的确定性过程。这项研究将检验这样一种假设，即栖息地退化造成的宿主生态变化将改变这些过程的相对影响，从而对群落组成和功能产生影响。将在马来西亚的森林改造梯度上对蝙蝠进行研究，并为每只蝙蝠获得单独匹配的肠道微生物组成、元基因组功能、饮食组成、宿主基因和社会互动措施的样本。这些数据与同现、系统发育和功能特征模式的分析一起，将被用于测试结构方程模型，该模型指定用于在因果建模框架中解开构建社区的过程。通过对社会性不同的共同分布的寄主物种的比较，将得出扩散在构建微生物群落中所起作用的证据。将使用共现网络方法评估种间关联。功能性状空间是根据个体蝙蝠微生物群中每个细菌系统类型的基因组推断而形成的。使用最大似然法和社区成员之间的16S基因比对来估计系统发育。为了测试饮食和宿主遗传学(宿主环境)在社区进程中的作用，研究人员用COI DNA条形码描述来自粪便的饮食，并通过基因组指纹定量宿主多样性和关联性。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Mammal guts are home to communities of microbes that play an important role in the nutrition and health of individual animals. These microbial communities, or microbiomes, are made up of hundreds of species of bacteria, but which species are present, and how common they are, varies from individual to individual animal. This variability is important because abnormal communities can lead to conditions that range from obesity to depression. However, the rules by which microbial communities come together or breakdown are poorly understood. Using wild bats as models, the researchers will investigate how host sociality, diet, genetics, and microbe functions and interactions shape the make-up of digestive microbiomes. The results of this research to understand the rules governing microbiome composition can help advance human and wildlife health. To improve students' understanding of how scientific research is conducted, the team will engage elementary school students from around the country in the project, sharing data live from the field in real time. Students will learn how to analyze and interpret the project data through the researchers' STEM K-12 initiative: The Malaysian Bat Education Adventure. Using an existing Biodiversity module (grades 5-6) and a new module "Microbial Diversity: What's in your bat?" (grades 6-7), students will be introduced to topics of microbial ecology and diversity. The program's success in changing student STEM knowledge, skills and attitude will be evaluated with quantitative methods in a pre- and post- intervention design with control group.The research will determine the relative role of community processes in structuring gut-microbial composition and function in insectivorous bat species co-distributed across a gradient of habitat degradation. The researchers hypothesize that microbiome community assembly and disassembly involve deterministic processes of niche filtering, species interactions, and dispersal. This research will test the hypothesis that changes in host ecology wrought by habitat degradation will alter the relative influence of these processes with consequences for community composition and function. Bats will be studied across a forest modification gradient in Malaysia, and individually-matched samples of gut-microbial composition, metagenome function, dietary composition, host genotype and measures of social interaction obtained for each bat. These data, in conjunction with analyses of co-occurrence, phylogenetic and functional trait patterns, will be used to test structural equation models specified to untangle the processes structuring communities in a causal modeling framework. Evidence of the role of dispersal in structuring microbiomes will derive from comparisons of co-distributed host species that differ in sociality. Interspecific associations will be assessed using co-occurrence network approaches. Functional trait space is developed from genomic inference for each bacterial phylotype within an individual bat's microbiome. Phylogenies are estimated using maximum likelihood and 16S gene alignment among community members. To test the role of diet and host genetics (the host environment) in community processes, the researchers describe diet from feces with the COI DNA barcodes, and quantify host diversity and relatedness through genome fingerprinting.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.