DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Characterizing the evolution of bacterial resource use of competing protists

解释地球上的生物多样性是一个涉及广泛学科的难题。这个难题的核心在于进化生物学家，他们调查多样性的起源，而生态学家则询问多样性是如何维持的。该项目的目标是了解生态学和进化如何相互作用，使物种随着时间的推移而共存。它将为研究人员提供新的研究技能和方法，从而获得竞争对手如何进化的令人兴奋的实验证据。通过参与这项研究，本科生将学习如何开发自己的研究问题，设计适当的实验，并完成数据分析。这项培训将通过一个项目扩展到高中学生，该项目允许学生在在线导师的指导下设计和执行实验。调查人员将开发符合佛罗里达高中标准的课程资源，特别是那些涉及进化和进化原理的课程资源。通过这些贡献，该项目将激发学生以探索性的方式批判性地思考进化，他们发现既有趣又有趣。该项目将使用高通量的下一代细菌测序来表征竞争原生生物进化导致的资源利用变化。 细菌储备培养物最初将在有和没有原生生物的情况下生长，以确定哪些细菌分类群受每个物种的影响最大。 这些细菌群落预计将包含数百个物种，非度量多维尺度分析将用于可视化每个原生生物物种的资源生态位。 在两周或大约50代进化之后，每个物种的资源生态位将再次被描述，以证明进化导致的饮食变化。 研究人员预测，原生生物将进化到在细菌资源的消耗上出现分歧，除非它们受到交替选择压力的限制，在这种情况下，研究人员预测物种将在资源利用上趋同。 这项工作将展示生态和进化力量如何在竞争资源的物种之间相互作用。

Explaining the biodiversity on Earth is a puzzle that engages a broad spectrum of disciplines. The heart of the puzzle rests with evolutionary biologists, who investigate the origins of diversity, and ecologists, who ask how diversity is maintained. The goal of this project is to understand how ecology and evolution interact to allow species to coexist over time. It will provide the investigators with access to new research skills and methods, resulting in exciting experimental evidence of how competitors evolve. By participating in this research, undergraduate students will learn how to develop their own research questions, design appropriate experiments, and complete data analyses. This training will extend to high school students through a program that allows students to design and perform experiments under the guidance of an online mentor. The investigators will develop curriculum resources that meet Florida's high school standards, particularly those that address evolution and evolutionary principles. Through these contributions, the project will stimulate students to think critically about evolution in an exploratory manner that they find both fun and interesting.This project will use high-throughput next-generation sequencing of bacteria to characterize shifts in resource use as a consequence of evolution in competing protists. Bacterial stock cultures will initially be grown with and without protists to determine which bacterial taxa are most affected by each species. These bacterial communities are expected to contain hundreds of species; non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis will be used to visualize the resource niche of each protist species. Subsequent to two weeks, or about 50 generations of evolution, the resource niche of each species will be characterized again to demonstrate shifts in diet as a result of evolution. The researchers predict that protists will evolve to diverge in consumption of bacterial resources unless they are constrained from doing so by alternate selection pressures, in which case the researchers predict species will converge in resource use. This work will demonstrate how ecological and evolutionary forces interact among species competing for resources.