CAREER: Microbial regulation of plant coexistence and invasive dominance: changes with environmental stress

职业：植物共存和入侵优势的微生物调节：随环境压力的变化

• 批准号: 2141922
• 负责人: Emily Farrer
• 金额: $ 90.07万
• 依托单位: Tulane University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-06-01 至 2027-05-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2141922&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Microbial; regulation; plant; coexistence

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Thousands of microorganisms (e.g., fungi, bacteria) live in soil, in and around plant roots. We know that these microbes impact plant health in both positive and negative ways – some microbes help plants take up nutrients, others cause disease. Environmental change can shift plant-microbe interactions in ways that may have negative consequences for plant diversity and exacerbate species invasions. Wetlands are globally important for carbon sequestration (removal of CO2 from the atmosphere), protecting coastal cities from hurricanes, and as nursery habitat for fisheries. A severe threat to wetlands is saltwater intrusion, where saline water moves inland due to sea level rise. The biota in these systems may not be adapted to prolonged, high salinity levels and so this project will investigate how saltwater intrusion affects plant-microbe interactions with consequences for plant coexistence and invasion of Gulf Coast marshes. Competitive interactions among plants also influence coexistence and invasion and will likely shift with elevated salinity, and so the research will compare the relative importance of competitive vs. microbial interactions in driving plant community responses to saltwater intrusion. Data collection and analysis will be integrated with a high school summer course, an undergraduate service-learning course, a graduate statistics course, and this project will provide training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate researchers. A deeper understanding of how plant-microbe interactions, plant diversity, and the growth of invasive species will be affected by changing environmental conditions is important for managing our natural resources and making predictions of future change. The proposed research will elucidate how plant-microbe interactions influence biodiversity and invasion under conditions of environmental change. It utilizes and extends the Plant-Soil Feedback (PSF) research framework which has become enormously effective for studying plant-microbial interactions and their effect on plant community coexistence and invasion outcomes. The project studies the ubiquitous wetland invader Common Reed (Phragmites australis) as its model invasive species. First, the proposed research will test how salinity affects plant-fungal and plant-bacterial interactions and feedbacks in coastal marshes using a field survey and feedback experiment combined with next generation amplicon sequencing. Second, the proposed work will apply modern coexistence theory to the PSF framework to partition how salinity alters competitive and microbially-mediated coexistence mechanisms. Third, the proposed work will extend PSF theory in a novel way by explicitly modeling microbial taxa in a three-year, outdoor, mesocosm experiment using linked plant-microbial population models to assess the timescales over which specific plant-microbe interactions play out to influence community structure and invasion. New modeling techniques will be developed to pinpoint the particular microbes that are causing plant community change, a difficult task due to the incredible biodiversity of microorganisms.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.

该奖项全部或部分由2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。真菌、细菌）生活在土壤中、植物根部及其周围。我们知道这些微生物以积极和消极的方式影响植物健康--一些微生物帮助植物吸收营养，另一些微生物导致疾病。环境变化可以改变植物与微生物之间的相互作用，可能对植物多样性产生负面影响，并加剧物种入侵。湿地对于碳固存（从大气中去除二氧化碳）、保护沿海城市免受飓风袭击以及作为渔业的育苗栖息地具有全球重要意义。对湿地的一个严重威胁是盐水入侵，由于海平面上升，盐水向内陆移动。这些系统中的生物群可能不适应长期的高盐度水平，因此该项目将研究盐水入侵如何影响植物-微生物相互作用，从而导致植物共存和入侵墨西哥湾沿岸沼泽。植物之间的竞争性相互作用也会影响共存和入侵，并可能随着盐度的升高而改变，因此研究将比较竞争性与微生物相互作用在驱动植物群落对盐水入侵的反应方面的相对重要性。数据收集和分析将与高中暑期课程，本科服务学习课程，研究生统计课程相结合，该项目将为研究生和本科生研究人员提供培训机会。更深入地了解植物-微生物相互作用、植物多样性和入侵物种的生长将如何受到不断变化的环境条件的影响，对于管理我们的自然资源和预测未来的变化非常重要。拟议的研究将阐明植物-微生物相互作用如何影响生物多样性和环境变化条件下的入侵。它利用并扩展了植物-土壤反馈（PSF）研究框架，该框架已成为研究植物-微生物相互作用及其对植物群落共存和入侵结果的影响的非常有效的框架。该项目研究了无处不在的湿地入侵者芦苇（芦苇）作为其模式入侵物种。首先，拟议的研究将测试盐度如何影响植物-真菌和植物-细菌的相互作用和反馈，在沿海沼泽地使用现场调查和反馈实验结合下一代扩增子测序。其次，拟议的工作将应用现代共存理论的PSF框架划分盐度如何改变竞争和微生物介导的共存机制。第三，拟议的工作将以一种新的方式扩展PSF理论，通过在一个为期三年的室外围隔实验中使用相关的植物-微生物种群模型明确建模微生物类群，以评估特定植物-微生物相互作用影响群落结构和入侵的时间尺度。由于微生物的生物多样性令人难以置信，这是一项艰巨的任务。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。