ClearWater: Clearing coloured waters by community breeding

在气候变化的情况下，为不断增长的人口提供饮用水是一项关键挑战。许多研究都集中在如何清除由恶劣天气事件和温度升高引起的有色水域上。试图从技术上清除有色水是具有挑战性和昂贵的。然而，细菌生物循环利用这些物质，并通过将溶解的有机碳物质转化为生物量，将它们重新引入营养循环。这一行动的实验旨在“培育”细菌群落，以提高它们清除有色水域的能力。为了了解环境变化如何改变这一过程，我们将在不同的温度和营养处理下进行实验，类似于预测全球变化的条件。以前的尝试并不是很成功，只能从众多社区中发现最好的社区，但最终的功能几乎没有改进。我们将探索培育细菌群落的过程，以清除彩色水域使用一个全新的协议。我们将应用新的理论，首先允许群落在生态上稳定，其次，在选择的时候，在设计中加入扰动，以增加这些群落的变化。所有细菌群落将通过元基因组测序进行表征，细菌资源利用将使用Orbitrap-mass-spectrometry进行探索。这将提供数据指导未来的研究人员如何培养微生物群落，以获得和改善特定的功能。研究人员将以分析宿主的宏基因组和质谱数据的形式获得宝贵的新知识。作为回报，他将在实验进化方面提供宝贵的专业知识。

Providing the growing human population with drinking-water under climate change is a pivotal challenge. Much research is focused on how to clear coloured waters, caused by harsh weather events and increasing temperatures. Trying to clear coloured water technically is challenging and costly. However, bacterial organisms recycle these materials and re-introduce them into nutrient cycles by turning the dissolved organic carbon material into biomass. The experiments in this action aim to "breed" bacterial communities to increase their ability in clearing coloured waters. To understand how environmental change may modify this process, we will conduct the experiments under different temperature and nutrient treatments similar to conditions predicted for global change. Previous attempts have not been very successful and were only able to detect the best communities out of many, but the final function rarely improved. We will explore the process of breeding bacterial communities to clear coloured waters using a totally new protocol. We will apply new theories and first allow communities to ecologically stabilize and second, by the time of selection, add perturbance into the design to increase variation within those communities. All bacterial communities will be characterized by meta-genomic-sequencing and bacterial resource usage will be explored using Orbitrap-mass-spectrometry. This will provide data guiding future researchers how to breed microbial communities for obtaining, but also improving, specific functions. The researcher will gain invaluable new knowledge in form of analysing metagenomic and mass-spectrometry data from the host. He will in return provide valuable expertise in experimental evolution.