NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Using metacommunity theory to assess the impact of multi-species interactions on gut microbial assembly

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. This project aims to understand the ways in which animals are connected within a community and how connectivity may help animals remain healthier even under stressful conditions. The community of bacteria within an animal’s gut, or host-associated gut microbiome, provides a unique system in which to test these ideas: the gut microbiome provides a number of important functions (digests food, produces vitamins, and trains the immune system) but also changes rapidly in response to an animal’s environment, social interactions, and diet. In order to balance natural microbial sharing processes and experimental manipulation, the Fellow will create a model aquatic system consisting of three species of frogs that naturally overlap in their wild habitat. By altering the frogs’ social and environmental conditions and examining how their gut microbiomes change, the Fellow will be able to disentangle one mechanism of community connectivity that could buffer animals against environmental stress. In addition, the use of amphibians in this research has important conservation implications: amphibians are often used as an indicator of ecosystem health, but are declining globally due to habitat degradation and increased disease prevalence. Understanding the mechanisms that govern amphibian health provides important context for management decisions of at-risk species. Throughout this project, the Fellow will mentor students from historically underrepresented groups, as well as work with existing institutional departments to create K-12 teaching module(s) for use in local public schools.This research tests whether the transfer of gut microbes, especially across host individuals and species, could be primarily driven by metacommunity processes. Specifically, ecological processes such as dispersal between hosts or environments have been shown to be important drivers of microbiome assembly, and limiting dispersal can significantly alter community composition. In a multi-species context, this project can extend the traditional use of community ecological theory in microbiome research to a metacommunity approach, treating individual hosts and host species as “patches” and tracking ecological and evolutionary processes (dispersal, selection, priority effects) within or between patches. By creating a tractable aquatic system in which to compare the relative importance of these eco-evolutionary processes, the Fellow will apply hypotheses proposed by metacommunity models to the microbiome and thus identify causal drivers of gut microbial assembly. Through this project, the Fellow will receive training in the fields of animal physiology, experimental biology, ecology, and genomics, as well as STEM education through the creation of K-12 teaching module(s) focused on beneficial microbes and amphibian conservation.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.