Understanding the mechanisms of microbial community assembly, stability and function

了解微生物群落组装、稳定性和功能的机制

• 批准号: NE/Y001249/1
• 负责人: Christopher Knight
• 金额: $ 107.75万
• 依托单位: University of Manchester
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FY001249%2F1
• 关键词: Understanding; mechanisms; microbial; community; assembly

Microbial communities inhabit almost all natural environments and perform a wide range of important natural processes. For example, microbial communities decompose organic matter and drive biogeochemical nitrogen and carbon cycles. Despite the critically important functions of microbial communities in ecosystems, our understanding of how these communities assemble and function is limited. This is in part because of the enormous diversity and complexity of such microbial communities, where a pinch of soil can contain thousands of species and billions of individual cells. To help us to understand this complexity we will build mathematical models to predict the assembly and stability of microbial communities. We will then test these models using controlled lab experiments with a simplified decomposer community; and finally, we will use our models to analyse the assembly of real-world microbial decomposer communities in the natural environment. Using this approach, we will answer three questions: First, how the individual interactions microbes have with each other determine the behaviour of the overall community they form together. Second, how variation in the environment (e.g. changes in temperature) affect this community level behaviour. And finally, how the functions that a microbial community performs together - for instance in the carbon or nitrogen cycles - can be predicted from genes that the individual microbes carry. Overall, our project will deliver a predictive understanding of how and why environmental microbial communities look and function as they do in nature, and thus enable better management of these critical components of natural ecosystems.

微生物群落栖息在几乎所有的自然环境中，并执行广泛的重要自然过程。例如，微生物群落分解有机物质并驱动非地球化学氮和碳循环。尽管微生物群落在生态系统中发挥着至关重要的作用，但我们对这些群落如何组装和发挥作用的理解是有限的。这部分是因为这种微生物群落的巨大多样性和复杂性，其中一小撮土壤可以包含数千种物种和数十亿个单个细胞。为了帮助我们理解这种复杂性，我们将建立数学模型来预测微生物群落的组装和稳定性。然后，我们将使用简化的分解者群落的受控实验室实验来测试这些模型;最后，我们将使用我们的模型来分析自然环境中真实世界微生物分解者群落的组装。使用这种方法，我们将回答三个问题：第一，微生物之间的相互作用如何决定它们共同形成的整个群落的行为。第二，环境的变化（例如温度的变化）如何影响这种社区水平的行为。最后，一个微生物群落如何共同发挥作用--例如在碳或氮循环中--可以从单个微生物携带的基因中预测出来。总的来说，我们的项目将提供一个预测性的了解如何以及为什么环境微生物群落的外观和功能，因为他们在自然界中，从而使这些自然生态系统的关键组成部分的更好的管理。