Ecology and evolution of plant-animal and host-microbe mutualisms

我的研究小组研究互惠共生的生态学和进化。大多数动物和植物至少有一种互惠关系；它们依赖于其他物种的营养、保护或传播，在相互作用中反馈给它们的伴侣。众所周知的互利共生的例子包括授粉、种子传播和抗植物共生，但发展最快的互利共生研究领域是与宿主相关的微生物组，这个术语指的是共同生活在宿主体内或宿主上的所有微生物，或者是它们的集体基因组。这些群落中的许多微生物对宿主是有益的，或者至少不是致病的，但是关于微生物群如何影响宿主的生理、生态和进化还有许多悬而未决的问题。我的研究项目旨在了解互惠共生如何将相互作用的物种的命运联系起来，影响它们的分布和丰度，特性和分子进化，甚至是地球上生命的多样化。该基金解决了关于互惠生态和进化在不同植物-动物和宿主-微生物系统中的四个基本问题：1)互惠是如何在基因组水平上进化的？研究抗植物和豆科植物-根瘤菌的共生关系，我们将探索共生的分子基础，并利用进化基因组学的方法来推断选择如何作用于编码共生性状的基因。2)多重共生是如何在微观和宏观进化尺度上进化的？我们将测试传粉者和蚂蚁互惠主义者是否在野外共同花园的热带植物上施加非加性选择，并组装多种植物-动物和植物-微生物互惠关系的全球数据集，以探索它们如何在植物系统发育中串联进化。3)我们能否预测宿主在微生物群和环境中的益处？我们正在开发一个高通量的实验系统，使用微小的水生植物小叶菜及其微生物群，我们将测试宿主-微生物相互作用的结果，跨越许多不同的微生物群落和许多多元环境。4)哪个“第二基因组”具有更持久的跨代效应：微生物组还是表观基因组？我们将使用3)中的新系统在压力和良性环境中培养宿主种群，并通过实验操纵微生物群和表观遗传标记，测量宿主的表型和代际适应性。我们将确定微生物组和表观基因组对跨代可塑性的相对重要性，特别是在应对压力时。这项研究将通过研究具有高度生态或基因组复杂性的现实世界系统，显著提高我们对共生机制如何进化的理解。它还将为HQP提供广泛的培训，他们将学习进行严格的实验室和现场实验，并获得分子和计算生物学所需的技能。这种综合方法鼓励HQP的智力发展，并将为他们在基础或应用科学领域的职业生涯做好准备。

My research team studies the ecology and evolution of mutualism. Most animals and plants are involved in at least one mutualism; they depend on other species for nutrition, protection, or dispersal in interactions that feed back to benefit to their partners. Well-known examples of mutualism include pollination, seed dispersal, and ant-plant symbioses, but the fastest growing area of mutualism research is the host-associated microbiome, a term that refers either to all the microbes living together in or on a host, or their collective genomes. Many microbes in these communities are beneficial to hosts, or at least not pathogenic, but there are many open questions about how microbiomes affect host physiology, ecology, and evolution. My research program seeks to understand how mutualism links the fates of interacting species, affecting their distribution and abundance, trait and molecular evolution, and even the diversification of life on Earth. This grant addresses four fundamental questions about mutualism ecology and evolution in diverse plant-animal and host-microbe systems: 1) How does mutualism evolve at a genomic level? Studying ant-plant and legume-rhizobium mutualisms, we will explore mutualism's molecular basis and use approaches from evolutionary genomics to infer how selection acts on genes that encode mutualistic traits. 2) How do multiple mutualisms evolve at micro- and macro-evolutionary scales? We will test whether pollinators and ant mutualists exert non-additive selection on a tropical plant in field common garden and assemble a global dataset of multiple plant-animal and plant-microbe mutualisms to explore how they evolve in tandem across the plant phylogeny. 3) Can we predict host benefits across microbiomes and environments? We are developing a high-throughput experimental system using the tiny aquatic plant Lemna minor and its microbiota, and we will test the outcome of host-microbe interactions across many distinct microbial communities and in many multivariate environments. 4) Which 'second genome' has more persistent transgenerational effects: the microbiome or the epigenome? We will use our new system from 3) to grow host populations in stressful and benign environments and experimentally manipulate microbiota and epigenetic marks, measuring host phenotypes and fitness across generations. We will determine the relative importance of the microbiome and the epigenome to transgenerational plasticity, especially in response to stress. This research will significantly improve our understanding of how mutualisms evolve through studies of real-world systems with high ecological or genomic complexity. It will also provide broad training to HQP who will learn to conduct rigorous lab and field experiments and acquire in-demand skills in molecular and computational biology. This integrative approach encourages the intellectual development of HQP and will prepare them for careers in basic or applied science.