ClearWater: Clearing coloured waters by community breeding

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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.