Understanding the mechanisms of microbial community assembly, stability and function

微生物群落居住在几乎所有的自然环境中，并执行广泛的重要自然过程。例如，微生物群落分解有机物并驱动生物地球化学氮和碳循环。尽管微生物群落在生态系统中具有至关重要的功能，但我们对这些群落如何组合和发挥作用的了解是有限的。这在一定程度上是因为这种微生物群落的巨大多样性和复杂性，在那里，一小块土壤可以包含数千个物种和数十亿个单独的细胞。为了帮助我们理解这种复杂性，我们将建立数学模型来预测微生物群落的组装和稳定性。然后，我们将使用简化分解者群落的受控实验室实验来测试这些模型；最后，我们将使用我们的模型来分析真实世界中微生物分解者群落在自然环境中的组装。使用这种方法，我们将回答三个问题：第一，微生物之间的个体相互作用如何决定它们共同形成的整个群落的行为。第二，环境的变化(例如温度的变化)如何影响这种社区层面的行为。最后，微生物群落如何共同发挥作用--例如在碳循环或氮循环中--可以从单个微生物携带的基因来预测。总体而言，我们的项目将提供对环境微生物群落在自然界中的外观和功能的预测性理解，从而能够更好地管理自然生态系统的这些关键组成部分。

Microbial communities inhabit almost all natural environments and perform a wide range of important natural processes. For example, microbial communities decompose organic matter and drive biogeochemical nitrogen and carbon cycles. Despite the critically important functions of microbial communities in ecosystems, our understanding of how these communities assemble and function is limited. This is in part because of the enormous diversity and complexity of such microbial communities, where a pinch of soil can contain thousands of species and billions of individual cells. To help us to understand this complexity we will build mathematical models to predict the assembly and stability of microbial communities. We will then test these models using controlled lab experiments with a simplified decomposer community; and finally, we will use our models to analyse the assembly of real-world microbial decomposer communities in the natural environment. Using this approach, we will answer three questions: First, how the individual interactions microbes have with each other determine the behaviour of the overall community they form together. Second, how variation in the environment (e.g. changes in temperature) affect this community level behaviour. And finally, how the functions that a microbial community performs together - for instance in the carbon or nitrogen cycles - can be predicted from genes that the individual microbes carry. Overall, our project will deliver a predictive understanding of how and why environmental microbial communities look and function as they do in nature, and thus enable better management of these critical components of natural ecosystems.