Collaborative Research: Linking carbon preferences and competition to predict and test patterns of functional diversity in soil microbial communities

合作研究：将碳偏好和竞争联系起来，预测和测试土壤微生物群落功能多样性的模式

• 批准号: 2312302
• 负责人: Rafael D'Andrea
• 金额: $ 20万
• 依托单位: SUNY at Stony Brook
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-01-01 至 2025-12-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2312302&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Linking; carbon; preferences; Collaborative; Research; Linking; carbon; preferences

This project will develop theory to understand the connections between biodiversity and competition for limiting resources. Competition is an important interaction among all living organisms. For example, plants compete with other plants for light and nutrient resources, while animals compete for food and territories. Because resources are limited, competition is unavoidable. This limitation constrains the ability of species to coexist together, so scientists seeking to understand biodiversity must also understand competition. Competition theory suggests that competing species can only coexist by specializing on different resources. However, this cannot explain the existence of diverse communities where species outnumber the resources. This project will explore the theoretical possibility that species in diverse communities may successfully share resources. The project will develop theory to test if coexistence occurs when communities contain clusters of species with highly similar traits but high dissimilarity among clusters. The focus will be on soil microbial communities, which are among the most diverse on Earth. Soil microbes compete for carbon molecules, which are their main source of energy and biomass. The research will quantify how these interactions affect those microbes’ ability to coexist. Given the important role that microbes play in nutrient cycling and the likely impacts that temperature changes have on competitive relationships, this research will allow ecologists to predict the consequences of accelerated environmental change. Additionally, this project will train and mentor graduate and undergraduate students and produce an interactive online app where students will learn how competition among individuals creates patterns of biodiversity at the community scale.The research builds on existing consumer-resource microbial models to develop a trait-based multispecies competition model for soil bacteria. The model will assume that carbon sources have natural inflow and degradation rates while microbe populations grow from immigration and temperature-dependent resource uptake and have a fixed mortality rate. Each species will have its own repertoire of usable carbon sources and, as it uptakes those resources, produces byproducts which may be part of other species’ repertoires (cross-feeding). The approaches include computer simulations, statistical inference, and clustering analysis in high-dimensional spaces. The central hypotheses that will be tested are a) competitive dynamics coupled with dispersal leads to the spontaneous emergence of several co-occurring consortia of species, such that species in the same cluster have high overlap in carbon preferences, whereas species in different clusters have low overlap in carbon preferences; b) environmental conditions and dispersal regimes determine the number and species composition of the clusters. These hypotheses are supported by results showing that competition is an important process in microbial communities and by the observation of analogous clustering patterns in competition-driven communities of animals, plants, and phytoplankton.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.

该项目将发展理论，以了解生物多样性与限制资源竞争之间的联系。竞争是所有生活组织之间的重要互动。例如，植物与其他植物竞争光和营养资源，而动物则争夺食品和领土。由于资源有限，因此竞争是不可避免的。这种局限性限制了物种共存的能力，因此寻求了解生物多样性的科学家还必须了解竞争。竞争理论表明，竞争物种只能通过专门研究不同的资源来共存。但是，这无法解释物种外部数量资源的不同社区的存在。该项目将探讨以下理论，即不同社区中的物种可能会成功共享资源。该项目将开发理论，以测试当社区包含具有高度相似性状但群集之间高度差异的物种集群时，是否发生共存。重点将放在土壤微生物群落上，这是地球上最转移的地方之一。土壤微生物竞争碳分子，这是它们的主要能源和生物量的来源。该研究将量化这些相互作用如何影响这些微生物共存的能力。鉴于微生物在营养循环中起着重要作用，以及温度变化对竞争关系的可能影响，这项研究将使生态学家能够预测加速环境变化的后果。此外，该项目将培训和精神学生和本科生培训，并创建一个互动的在线应用程序，学生将学习个人之间的竞争如何在社区规模上创造生物多样性的模式。该研究基于现有的消费者资源资源微生物模型，以开发基于特质的基于特质的多种种族竞争模型。该模型将假设碳源具有自然的流入和降解率，而微生物种群因移民和温度依赖性资源的吸收而增长，并且具有固定的死亡率。每个物种都会有自己的可用碳源曲目，并且在吸收这些资源时，会产生副产品，这些副产品可能是其他物种曲目（交叉进食）的一部分。这些方法包括计算机模拟，统计推断和高维空间中的聚类分析。将要测试的中心假设是a）竞争动力学加上分散的动力学，导致了几个共同存在的物种群体的赞助出现，因此同一簇中的物种在碳偏爱中具有很高的重叠，而不同簇中的物种在碳偏好中的重叠率很低； b）环境条件和扩散状态决定了集群的数量和物种组成。这些假设得到了结果的支持，结果表明竞争是微生物社区的重要过程，并且通过观察竞争驱动的动物，植物和植物浮游生物社区中的类似聚类模式。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识优点和广泛影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并通过评估获得了珍贵的支持。