Collaborative Research: MIM: The impact of the fungal microbiome in metal tolerance and soil biogeochemical transformations

有些金属是生命必需的营养物质，而有些则不是必需的，甚至对生物体有害。真菌和细菌是经常密切联系的微生物，在转化和解毒环境中的金属方面发挥关键作用。尽管这一点很重要，但人们对细菌和真菌之间的相互作用如何影响金属的转化和/或解毒的了解相对较少。该项目的目标是通过确定真菌-细菌相互作用如何影响金属转化来解决这一知识差距。这将通过采用先进的、最先进的科学分析技术的新颖的多学科研究方法来实现。通过该项目获得的知识将使金属转化的工程控制在环境净化、生物精炼、纳米颗粒生产和其他有益应用中得到广泛应用。这项研究的成功完成有很大的潜力通过改善环境修复和工业制造来造福社会。该项目将通过为学生研究人员提供独特的培训机会，为环境工程、微生物学、地球化学、生物信息学和艺术等不同领域提供桥梁，从而改善美国的STEM劳动力。金属污染的修复是一项重大的环境挑战，因为与许多有机污染物不同，金属物种不能降解，只能提取或生物转化为毒性较小的形式。虽然过去生物转化金属的方法主要集中在单个微生物上，但宿主-微生物组相互作用已显示出生物转化周围环境和提高宿主恢复能力的潜力。然而，微生物宿主-微生物组系统对金属生物转化的机制在很大程度上是未知的。这个项目的总体目标是阐明控制真菌微生物群的生命规则。这一目标将通过对真菌微生物组的特别关注来实现，真菌微生物组包括真菌宿主、内共生菌（内细菌）和共生菌（活在细胞外的外细菌）作为宿主-微生物组系统的模型。该项目的具体研究目标是：了解金属和类金属对真菌微生物群多样性和传播的影响（兼性和强制性）；并通过介导金属离子、纳米颗粒或其他金属物种的摄取、转化和吸附，确定真菌微生物组在金属耐受性中的作用。一个深度整合的多学科方法将用于研究在金属存在下控制真菌微生物群结构和功能的生理、遗传/基因组和代谢过程。这将使用最新的科学同位素探测，先进的显微镜，光谱学，整合基因组学，转录组学和金属组学来阐明微生物组如何影响宿主对金属离子的代谢活性。这项研究的成功完成对于鉴定金属耐受性和生物转化的新基因和/或途径具有很强的潜力，并扩展了我们对自然界真菌微生物群结构和功能的机制理解。这些知识通过促进修复、水处理、电子制造、抗菌生产、医药和相关领域的应用，具有强大的造福社会的潜力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Some metals are essential nutrients for life, while some are non-essential or even harmful to living organisms. Fungi and bacteria are microorganisms that often live in a close association and play a key role in transforming and detoxifying metals in the environment. In spite of this importance, there is relatively little understanding of how the interactions between bacteria and fungi influence the transformation and/or detoxification of metals. The goal of this project is to address this knowledge gap by identifying how fungal-bacterial interactions affect metal transformation. This will be achieved through a novel multidisciplinary research approach employing advanced, state-of-the-science analytical techniques. Knowledge gained through this project will allow the engineered control of metal transformations for a wide range of applications in environmental cleanup, biorefining, production of nanoparticles, and other beneficial applications. Successful completion of this research has strong potential to benefit society through improvements in environmental remediation and industrial manufacturing. This project will improve the Nation’s STEM workforce by providing a unique training opportunity for student researchers that bridges diverse fields such as environmental engineering, microbiology, geochemistry, bioinformatics, and art.Remediation of metal contamination is a major environmental challenge because, unlike many organic pollutants, metal species cannot be degraded and can only be extracted or biotransformed to less toxic forms. While past approaches to biotransform metals have focused primarily on single microorganisms, host-microbiome interactions have shown potential to biotransform surrounding environments and improve host resiliency. However, the mechanisms for metal biotransformation by microbial host-microbiome systems are largely unknown. The overall goal of this project is to elucidate the rules of life that govern fungal microbiomes. This goal will be achieved through a specific focus on fungal microbiomes, which include a fungal host, endosymbionts (endobacteria), and symbionts (exobacteria that live extracellularly) as a model host-microbiome system. The specific research objectives of this project designed to achieve the goal are to: understand the effects of metals and metalloids on the diversity and transmission of fungal microbiomes (facultative and obligatory); and determine the role of fungal microbiomes in metal tolerance by mediating the uptake, transformation, and sorption of metal ions, nanoparticles, or other metal species. A deeply integrated multidisciplinary approach will be used to investigate physiological, genetic/genomic, and metabolic processes that govern the structure and function of fungal microbiomes in the presence of metals. This will be achieved using novel state-of-the-science isotope probing, advanced microscopy, spectroscopy, and integrated genomics, transcriptomics, and metallomics to elucidate how the microbiome influences the metabolic activity of the host towards metal ions. Successful completion of this research has strong potential to identify new genes and/or pathways for metal tolerance and biotransformation, as well as expand our mechanistic understanding of the structure and function of fungal microbiomes in nature. This knowledge has strong potential to benefit society by facilitating applications in remediation, water treatment, electronics manufacturing, antimicrobial production, medicine, and related fields.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.