CAREER: MECHANISMS OF ASSEMBLY AND COEXISTENCE IN SPECIES-RICH MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES

动物和植物与微生物一起进化。这些微生物中的许多可以提供营养和保护免受有害病原体的侵袭。研究人员使用微生物来改善医疗保健和农业；然而，很难像在自然界中发现的那样，用许多不同类型的微生物创建稳定的群落。这个项目旨在研究这些社区是如何形成的，以及我们如何在受控的环境中创建和维护它们。研究人员将使用生态学的原理来测试不同的因素，如营养类型、环境和添加的微生物类型，如何影响他们在实验室中创建的群落的稳定性。这个职业项目将涉及爱达荷州的理科学生，特别是来自低收入、农村和第一代背景的学生，包括爱达荷州最大的社区大学的学生。他们还将通过研讨会为教师提供培训，并使用常见细菌物种和3D打印工具创建教育材料。为了实现该项目的研究目标，该团队将表征物种丰富的合成群落中共存的环境轴线，调查系统发育和功能多样性、环境过滤和优先效应如何影响丰富度和生态系统结果。该团队将使用现代共存理论(MCT)建模方法来划分物种丰富的群落的共存机制，并将理论的经验测试与完整群落的结果进行比较。实验将主要使用具有良好特征的猪笼草植物微生物群落，但也将扩展到山艾树叶微生物群，以涉及当地物种的保护关注。该项目由环境生物学部门的人口和社区生态集群和既定的激励竞争研究计划(EPSCoR)共同资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Animals and plants have evolved alongside microscopic organisms. Many of these microbes can provide nutrition and protection against harmful pathogens. Researchers use microbes to improve healthcare and agriculture; however, it is difficult to create stable communities with many different types of microbes like the ones found in nature. This project aims to study how these communities form and how we can create and maintain them in controlled settings. The researchers will use principles from ecology to test how different factors, such as the type of nutrients, the environment, and the types of microbes added, affect the stability of the communities they create in the lab. This CAREER project will involve students in science across Idaho, especially students from low-income, rural, and first-generation backgrounds including students from the largest community college in Idaho. They will also provide training for teachers through a workshop and create educational materials using common bacterial species and 3D-printed tools.In order to achieve the project’s research goals, the team will characterize environmental axes of coexistence in species-rich synthetic communities, investigating how phylogenetic and functional diversity, environmental filtering, and priority effects influence richness and ecosystem outcomes. The team will use a Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT) modeling approach to partition coexistence mechanisms for species-rich communities and will compare empirical tests of theory with full-community results. The experiments will primarily use well-characterized pitcher plant microbial communities, but also extend to the sagebrush leaf microbiome to involve a local species of conservation concern. This project is jointly funded by the Population and Community Ecology Cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.