ClearWater: Clearing coloured waters by community breeding

在气候变化下为不断增长的人口提供饮用水是一项关键的挑战。许多研究都集中在如何清除因恶劣天气和气温上升而导致的有色水域。尝试从技术上清除有色水是一项具有挑战性且成本高昂的任务。然而，细菌有机体通过将溶解的有机碳材料转化为生物质来回收这些物质，并将它们重新引入营养循环。这项实验的目的是“繁殖”细菌群落，以提高它们清除有色水域的能力。为了了解环境变化如何改变这一过程，我们将在类似于预测全球变化的条件下，在不同的温度和营养处理下进行实验。之前的尝试并不是很成功，只能从许多社区中发现最好的社区，但最终的功能很少得到改善。我们将探索繁殖细菌群落的过程，以使用一种全新的协议来清除有色水域。我们将应用新的理论，首先让社区在生态上稳定下来，其次，在选择的时候，在设计中加入扰动，以增加这些社区内的变化。所有的细菌群落将通过元基因组测序来表征，细菌资源的使用将使用Orbitrap-MS进行探索。这将提供数据，指导未来的研究人员如何培养微生物群落，以获得并改进特定的功能。研究人员将通过分析来自宿主的元基因组学和质谱学数据的形式获得宝贵的新知识。作为回报，他将在实验进化方面提供宝贵的专业知识。

Providing the growing human population with drinking-water under climate change is a pivotal challenge. Much research is focused on how to clear coloured waters, caused by harsh weather events and increasing temperatures. Trying to clear coloured water technically is challenging and costly. However, bacterial organisms recycle these materials and re-introduce them into nutrient cycles by turning the dissolved organic carbon material into biomass. The experiments in this action aim to "breed" bacterial communities to increase their ability in clearing coloured waters. To understand how environmental change may modify this process, we will conduct the experiments under different temperature and nutrient treatments similar to conditions predicted for global change. Previous attempts have not been very successful and were only able to detect the best communities out of many, but the final function rarely improved. We will explore the process of breeding bacterial communities to clear coloured waters using a totally new protocol. We will apply new theories and first allow communities to ecologically stabilize and second, by the time of selection, add perturbance into the design to increase variation within those communities. All bacterial communities will be characterized by meta-genomic-sequencing and bacterial resource usage will be explored using Orbitrap-mass-spectrometry. This will provide data guiding future researchers how to breed microbial communities for obtaining, but also improving, specific functions. The researcher will gain invaluable new knowledge in form of analysing metagenomic and mass-spectrometry data from the host. He will in return provide valuable expertise in experimental evolution.