Research Initiation Award: Metagenomic Approach to Assess Water Quality and Microbial Load Variability of an Urban Watershed

研究启动奖为历史上黑人学院和大学的初级和中级职业教师提供支持，他们正在建立新的研究项目或重新定向和重建现有项目。预计该奖项将有助于进一步提高教师的研究能力和效率，改善家庭机构的研究和教学，并使本科生参与研究经验。该研究将通过评估微生物群落，表征时间和空间的变异性，并比较城市流域和未受影响的流域之间的微生物群落的组成，多样性和丰富的细菌群落的理解。基于DNA测序的微生物组研究的发展，导致更彻底的调查环境条件对微生物群落组成的影响。尽管测序技术取得了最新进展，但确定微生物群落结构和功能多样性的生态机制仍然是一个重大挑战。这一挑战对于高度动态的生态系统（如城市系统的流水）尤其重要。该项目将利用宏基因组学技术提供有关城市流域内微生物群落如何持续存在和变化的新信息。预计在时间上，秋季和冬季的微生物群落将与春季和夏季的微生物群落不同，而在空间上，人类输入下游的微生物群落将与自然系统不同。这项研究的结果将提高我们对城市化塑造溪流微生物群落的方式的理解，并提供对城市流域内微生物群落如何持续和变化的洞察力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The study will enhance the understanding of the composition, diversity, and richness of bacterial communities by evaluating the microbial community, characterize variability in time and space and compare microbial community between an urban watershed and an unimpacted watershed.The development of microbiome studies based on DNA sequencing has led to more thorough investigations of the effect of environmental conditions on microbial community composition. Despite recent advances in sequencing technologies, identifying the ecological mechanisms that underlie microbial community structure and functional diversity remains a major challenge. This challenge is particularly important for highly dynamic ecosystems such as flowing-waters of urban systems. This project will provide new information on how microbial communities persist and change within an urban watershed using metagenomic techniques. It is expected that temporally, the microbial community in the fall and winter months will be distinct from the microbial community in the spring and summer months, while spatially, the microbial community immediately downstream from anthropogenic inputs will be distinct from natural systems. The findings from this study will improve our understanding of the way urbanization shapes stream microbial communities and provide insight of how microbial communities persist and change within an urban watershed.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.