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

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.

该项目将发展理论来理解生物多样性与限制资源竞争之间的联系。例如，植物与其他植物竞争光和营养资源，而动物则竞争食物和领土资源。竞争是有限的，这种限制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也必须了解竞争理论认为，竞争物种只能通过专门利用不同的资源来共存。存在多样化的群落，其中物种该项目将探讨不同群落中的物种可以成功共享资源的理论可能性，该项目将开发理论来测试当群落包含具有高度相似性状但群落之间高度相异的物种群时是否会发生共存。土壤微生物群落是地球上最多样化的微生物群落，它们争夺碳分子，而碳分子是它们的主要能源和生物量来源。微生物在营养循环中发挥的重要作用以及温度变化对竞争关系可能产生的影响，这项研究将使生态学家能够预测环境加速变化的后果。此外，该项目还将培训研究生和本科生，并培养一名互动导师。在线应用程序，学生将了解个体之间的竞争如何在社区范围内创造生物多样性模式。该研究以现有的消费者资源微生物模型为基础，开发基于性状的土壤细菌多物种竞争模型。该模型将假设碳源具有碳源。自然流入和降解率而微生物种群的增长则取决于移民和温度依赖性资源的吸收，并且具有固定的死亡率。每个物种都有自己的可用碳源库，并且当它吸收这些资源时，会产生可能成为其他物种库的一部分的副产品。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，其中要测试的中心假设是：a) 竞争动态与分散导致了几种的自发出现。物种共生群落，同一簇中的物种在碳偏好上具有高度重叠，而不同簇中的物种在碳偏好上具有较低重叠； b) 环境条件和扩散机制决定了簇的数量和物种组成。这些假设得到了以下结果的支持：竞争是微生物群落中的一个重要过程，以及对竞争驱动的动物、植物和浮游植物群落中类似聚类模式的观察。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并被视为值得通过使用基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。