CAREER: MECHANISMS OF ASSEMBLY AND COEXISTENCE IN SPECIES-RICH MICROBIAL COMMUNITIES

Animals and plants have evolved alongside microscopic organisms. Many of these microbes can provide nutrition and protection against harmful pathogens. Researchers use microbes to improve healthcare and agriculture; however, it is difficult to create stable communities with many different types of microbes like the ones found in nature. This project aims to study how these communities form and how we can create and maintain them in controlled settings. The researchers will use principles from ecology to test how different factors, such as the type of nutrients, the environment, and the types of microbes added, affect the stability of the communities they create in the lab. This CAREER project will involve students in science across Idaho, especially students from low-income, rural, and first-generation backgrounds including students from the largest community college in Idaho. They will also provide training for teachers through a workshop and create educational materials using common bacterial species and 3D-printed tools. In order to achieve the project’s research goals, the team will characterize environmental axes of coexistence in species-rich synthetic communities, investigating how phylogenetic and functional diversity, environmental filtering, and priority effects influence richness and ecosystem outcomes. The team will use a Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT) modeling approach to partition coexistence mechanisms for species-rich communities and will compare empirical tests of theory with full-community results. The experiments will primarily use well-characterized pitcher plant microbial communities, but also extend to the sagebrush leaf microbiome to involve a local species of conservation concern. This project is jointly funded by the Population and Community Ecology Cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). 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.