CAREER: Microbial regulation of plant coexistence and invasive dominance: changes with environmental stress

职业：植物共存和入侵优势的微生物调节：随环境压力的变化

• 批准号: 2141922
• 负责人: Emily Farrer
• 金额: $ 90.07万
• 依托单位: Tulane University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-06-01 至 2027-05-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2141922&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Microbial; regulation; plant; coexistence

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Thousands of microorganisms (e.g., fungi, bacteria) live in soil, in and around plant roots. We know that these microbes impact plant health in both positive and negative ways – some microbes help plants take up nutrients, others cause disease. Environmental change can shift plant-microbe interactions in ways that may have negative consequences for plant diversity and exacerbate species invasions. Wetlands are globally important for carbon sequestration (removal of CO2 from the atmosphere), protecting coastal cities from hurricanes, and as nursery habitat for fisheries. A severe threat to wetlands is saltwater intrusion, where saline water moves inland due to sea level rise. The biota in these systems may not be adapted to prolonged, high salinity levels and so this project will investigate how saltwater intrusion affects plant-microbe interactions with consequences for plant coexistence and invasion of Gulf Coast marshes. Competitive interactions among plants also influence coexistence and invasion and will likely shift with elevated salinity, and so the research will compare the relative importance of competitive vs. microbial interactions in driving plant community responses to saltwater intrusion. Data collection and analysis will be integrated with a high school summer course, an undergraduate service-learning course, a graduate statistics course, and this project will provide training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate researchers. A deeper understanding of how plant-microbe interactions, plant diversity, and the growth of invasive species will be affected by changing environmental conditions is important for managing our natural resources and making predictions of future change. The proposed research will elucidate how plant-microbe interactions influence biodiversity and invasion under conditions of environmental change. It utilizes and extends the Plant-Soil Feedback (PSF) research framework which has become enormously effective for studying plant-microbial interactions and their effect on plant community coexistence and invasion outcomes. The project studies the ubiquitous wetland invader Common Reed (Phragmites australis) as its model invasive species. First, the proposed research will test how salinity affects plant-fungal and plant-bacterial interactions and feedbacks in coastal marshes using a field survey and feedback experiment combined with next generation amplicon sequencing. Second, the proposed work will apply modern coexistence theory to the PSF framework to partition how salinity alters competitive and microbially-mediated coexistence mechanisms. Third, the proposed work will extend PSF theory in a novel way by explicitly modeling microbial taxa in a three-year, outdoor, mesocosm experiment using linked plant-microbial population models to assess the timescales over which specific plant-microbe interactions play out to influence community structure and invasion. New modeling techniques will be developed to pinpoint the particular microbes that are causing plant community change, a difficult task due to the incredible biodiversity of microorganisms.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.

该奖项由2021年《美国救援计划法》（公法117-2）全部或部分资助。成千上万的微生物（例如真菌，细菌）生活在植物根和周围的土壤中。我们知道这些微生物以正面和负面的方式影响植物健康 - 一些微生物可以帮助植物吸收营养，而另一些微生物会导致疾病。环境变化可以以可能对植物多样性产生负面影响和加剧物种入侵的方式改变植物 - 微叶片的相互作用。湿地对于碳疗法（从大气中清除二氧化碳），保护沿海城市免受飓风和作为渔业托儿所的栖息地至关重要。对湿地的严重威胁是盐水的侵入，盐水由于海平面上升而在内陆移动。这些系统中的生物群可能不适用于延长的高盐度水平，因此该项目将研究盐水侵入如何影响植物 - 微生物相互作用，并影响植物共存和墨西哥湾沿岸沼泽的影响。植物之间的竞争相互作用还会影响共存和入侵，并可能随盐度升高而转移，因此研究将比较竞争性与微生物相互作用在推动植物社区对盐水侵入的反应中的相对重要性。数据收集和分析将与高中夏季课程，本科服务学习课程，研究生统计课程集成，该项目将为研究生和本科研究人员提供培训机会。对植物 - 微生物相互作用，植物多样性和入侵物种的增长将受到不断变化的环境条件的影响，这对管理我们的自然资源和预测未来变化至关重要。拟议的研究将阐明植物 - 微生物相互作用如何影响环境变化条件下的生物多样性和侵袭。它利用并扩展了植物土壤反馈（PSF）研究框架，该框架对于研究植物 - 微生物相互作用及其对植物群落共存和入侵结果的影响非常有效。该项目将无处不在的湿地入侵者普通芦苇（Australis Phragmites）作为其模型入侵物种。首先，拟议的研究将测试盐度如何使用现场调查和反馈实验以及下一代Agplicon测序结合使用沿海沼泽的植物膜和植物 - 细菌相互作用以及反馈。其次，拟议的工作将将现代共存理论应用于PSF框架，以分区盐度如何改变竞争性和微生物介导的共存机制。第三，拟议的工作将通过在三年的户外中室中明确建模微生物分类群来扩展PSF理论，使用链接的植物 - 微生物种群模型来评估特定植物植物 - 微生物相互作用以影响社区结构和入侵的时间表。将开发新的建模技术来指出引起植物社区变化的特定微生物，这是由于微生物的令人难以置信的生物多样性而导致的一项艰巨任务。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛影响的审查标准通过评估来评估的。