BII-Implementation: The EMERGE Institute: Identifying EMergent Ecosystem Responses through Genes-to-Ecosystems Integration

了解生物系统如何随着时间的推移相互作用和影响是生物学的一项重大挑战。解决这一挑战对于预测生态系统对不断变化的条件的反应至关重要，以便为人类的行动和政策提供信息。然而，理解一直受到阻碍，因为生物研究界跨越许多子领域，每个领域都有自己的视角、方法和重点，彼此之间几乎没有接触。新兴生态系统应对变化生物集成研究所(Emerge BII)将整合生物化学、遗传学、分子生物学、生理学、生态学、进化论和生态系统科学的见解，为这些动态相互作用开发一个全面的框架。利用14个组织和15个科学分支学科的力量，Emerge以前所未有的分辨率整合了研究和培训、实地观察和实验室实验以及新的测量方法，以了解一个气候关键案例研究：快速变暖的北极如何将永久冻土转变为湿地，加速碳循环，并进一步影响地球气候。Emerge将通过一个研究交流计划、一个暑期研究所和一个本科生研究计划来培养新一代综合生物学家。为了进一步扩大其影响，Emerge将通过TEDx式的活动和发展高中综合生物学研讨会等活动，向公众和科学界宣传其工作。总体而言，Emerge BII的发现、工具和尖端受训人员将帮助社会响应和管理不断变化的生物系统。Emerge BII利用十年来对融化的永久冻土泥炭地的综合系统特征，为评估自然和工程生态系统变化的多层次响应提供了一个框架。这一框架通过新的测量方法整合和扩展了对基因到生态系统的理解，以增加微生物(菌株分辨的元基因组学和元转录组学)、病毒(dsDNA、ssDNA、RNA)和可移动元素(质粒、内含子和产生逆转录元素的多样性)的系统发育广度和分辨率，以研究它们之间以及与生态系统的相互作用。然后，这项研究完成了这个循环，以评估不断变化的生态系统如何通过适应、组装和适应过程反过来影响社区、种群和基因。对不同解冻阶段的微生物种群和群落进行的十年实地观察将得到新启用的适应特征的应变解析分析的补充，而扰动实验将表征复杂群落中的微生物如何适应变化。这些基因到生态系统到基因的测量，其中许多将是自然群落的第一次，将与广泛的生物地球化学和生态系统测量相结合，以评估它们对系统输出的影响，并开发社区(BioCrunch)和景观(生态系统)尺度过程的预测模型。该项目将提高对融化的永久冻土系统如何响应和引起变化的理解，重点是碳循环。由此产生的框架将为评估其他系统中的微生物变化提供基础，如国家科学基金会的长期生态研究地点和国家生态观测站网络，在这些系统中，此类高分辨率的系统级数据正在越来越多地被收集。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。

Understanding how biological systems interact with and influence one another over time is a Grand Challenge of Biology. Resolving this challenge is essential to predicting ecosystem responses to changing conditions to inform human action and policy. Yet understanding has been hampered because the Biological research community spans many sub-fields, each with its own perspectives, approaches, and focus, and with little exposure to one another. The EMergent Ecosystem Responses to ChanGE Biology Integration Institute (EMERGE BII) will integrate insights across Biochemistry, Genetics, Molecular Biology, Physiology, Ecology, Evolution, and Ecosystem Science to develop a comprehensive framework for these dynamic interactions. Leveraging the power of 14 organizations and 15 scientific subdisciplines, EMERGE integrates research and training, field observations and laboratory experiments, and novel measurements at unprecedented resolution, to understand a climate-critical case study: how a rapidly warming Arctic is transforming permafrost into wetlands, accelerating cycling of carbon, and further affecting earth's climate. EMERGE will train a new generation of integrative biologists through a program of research exchanges, a Summer Institute and an undergraduate research program. To further extend its impact, EMERGE will communicate its work to the public and the scientific community through such activities as a TEDx-style event and development of high school Integrative Biology Workshops. Collectively, the EMERGE BII’s discoveries, tools, and cutting-edge trainees will help society to respond to, and manage, changing biological systems.The EMERGE BII leverages a decade of integrated system characterization of a thawing permafrost peatland to produce a framework for evaluating multi-level responses to changes in natural and engineered ecosystems. This framework integrates and expands upon genes-to-ecosystems understanding via new measurements to increase phylogenetic breadth and resolution of microbes (strain-resolved metagenomics and metatranscriptomics), viruses (dsDNA, ssDNA, RNA), and mobile elements (plasmids, introns, and diversity generating retro-elements), to study interactions among them and with the ecosystem. The study then completes the loop to assess how changing ecosystems in turn impact communities, populations, and genes, via processes of acclimation, assembly and adaptation. A decade of field observations of microbial populations and communities at different thaw stages will be complemented by newly-enabled strain-resolved analyses of adaptation signatures, while perturbation experiments will characterize how microbes in complex communities acclimate to change. These genes-to-ecosystems-to-genes measurements, many of which will be firsts for natural communities, will be coupled to extensive biogeochemical and ecosystem measurements to assess their influence on system outputs, and to develop predictive models of community- (BioCrunch) and landscape- (ecosys) scale processes. This project will improve understanding of how thawing permafrost systems respond to and cause changes, with a focus on carbon cycling. The resultant framework will provide a foundation for assessing microbial change in other systems, like the National Science Foundation’s Long-term Ecological Research sites and National Ecological Observatory Network, where such highly resolved systems-level data are increasingly being collected.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.