EAGER: Importance of bacterial phenotypic plasticity relative to changes in community composition as responses to disturbance.

细菌负责一些最基本和最基本的生态系统功能，从为农作物提供养分，到在我们呼吸的空气中产生氧气。细菌物种形成由许多不同功能类型组成的复杂群落，哪些类型存在以及它们的行为和相互作用影响生态系统产生的整体功能。抗生素处理、化肥径流或外来物种入侵等因素在生态系统中造成的干扰，可能会改变细菌群落的物种组成。即使许多相同的细菌物种在干扰后仍然存在，它们提供的功能可能会因干扰而改变，并对整个生态系统造成巨大影响。这个项目将研究湖泊细菌群落如何应对影响北美许多水体的广泛干扰-斑马和Quagga贻贝的入侵。这些非本土贻贝物种已经蔓延到美国30多个州的湖泊和河流，并对食物网和渔业产生了重大影响。这个项目的结果将帮助我们了解这些贻贝的生态系统效应是如何通过它们对细菌群落的影响来表现出来的。研究结果将帮助我们预测其他类型的干扰将如何改变细菌提供的生态系统服务。该项目还将通过一个集中的暑期项目来整合对科学和技术领域感兴趣的本科生。该项目的目标是研究细菌群落对短期和中期生物干扰的反应，以区分由表型可塑性引起的细菌生理反应和由细菌群落组成变化介导的生态反应的作用。这项工作将探索淡水湖中淡水贝类入侵对驻留细菌群落的影响，并将采用实验室和野外实验相结合的方式。该项目依赖于最近开发的一种基于细菌多样性的流式细胞仪分析的方法，当与基于测序的分析相结合时，研究人员将允许研究人员区分细菌群落的表型和基因反应。它有望在微生物表型特征的原位可塑性的高通量测量与潜在的分子机制(基因表达的变化)之间建立直接联系。这不仅将使研究人员能够解决该项目的核心生物学问题，还将建立一种新的方法，在微生物生态领域更广泛地解决表型可塑性的重要性，目前微生物生态领域主要关注群落组成的变化。

Bacteria are responsible for some of the most basic and essential of ecosystem functions, from providing nutrients to crop plants, to generating oxygen in the air we breathe. Bacterial species form complex communities composed of many different functional types, and which types are present and how they behave and interact affects the overall functions produced by the ecosystem. Disturbances in ecosystems caused by things like antibiotic treatments, fertilizer runoff, or invasion by non-native species, can change the species composition of bacterial communities. Even if many of the same bacterial species remain after a disturbance, the functions they provide can be altered by the disturbance, and result in a large impact on the entire ecosystem. This project will examine how lake bacterial communities respond to a widespread disturbance impacting many waterbodies in North American - invasion by zebra and quagga mussels. These non-native mussel species have spread to lakes and rivers in over 30 US states and have had major impacts on the food webs and fisheries. Results from this project will help us understand how the ecosystem effects of these mussels is manifest through their impact on the bacterial communities. The results will help us predict how other types of disturbance will change the ecosystem services provided by the bacteria. The project will also integrate incoming undergraduate students interested in science and technology fields through an intensive summer program focused on increasing retention and diversity in science and technology majors.The objective of this project is to study the responses of bacterial communities to short and medium term biological disturbance, in order to separate the roles of bacterial physiological responses caused by phenotypic plasticity from ecological responses mediated by shifts in bacterial community composition. This work will explore effects of dreissenid mussel invasion in freshwater lakes on resident bacterial communities, and will employ a combination of laboratory and field experiments. The project relies on a recently developed method based on flow cytometric analysis of bacterial diversity that, when combined with sequencing based analyses, will allow the researchers to distinguish phenotypic from genotypic responses of bacterial communities. It holds promise to establish direct connections between high-throughput measurements of in situ plasticity of microbial phenotypic traits and the underlying molecular mechanism (changes in gene expression). This will not only allow the researchers to address the project's central biological question, but will also establish a new approach to tackling the importance of phenotypic plasticity more broadly in the field of microbial ecology, which currently is primarily focused on community composition shifts.