Collaborative Research: Synthetic microbial consortia for organismal resilience and reproducible ecosystem services in changing environments

As our planet's climate continues to change, finding new approaches to alleviate its impact is crucial. Microbiomes, which consist of smaller organisms making a living on larger species, can affect how their hosts respond to environmental change. This project evaluates whether and how we can assemble synthetic microbiomes to help host species cope with the impacts of environmental change. Due to the enormous diversity of microbial communities, there are numerous ways to engineer synthetic microbiomes, making it difficult to identify the principles that underpin their impacts on host species. The researchers will employ high-throughput techniques to simultaneously evaluate the impacts of different synthetic communities and environmental conditions on plant hosts. The results will expand our understanding of how environmental change alters the impacts of microbes on hosts and how engineered synthetic microbial communities may help hosts adapt to a changing climate. The researchers will actively mentor students from middle school to undergraduate level, create a new Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience Lab course in the cutting-edge field of synthetic microbiology, and design a backyard research program for under-served middle and high school students to provide training to attract their interest to possible careers in STEM. This study will explore the intersection of different research areas to study the interactions between hosts and microbes, including symbiosis, evolutionary biology, and ecosystem functioning. It will assess how elevated temperatures affect three crucial components of host-microbe interactions: (1) microbe-microbe interactions and their impact on host fitness, (2) functional redundancy and its effect on biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and (3) evolvability during microbiome breeding. To achieve this goal, the researchers will collect duckweed, a widespread aquatic plant, across a temperature gradient, acquire bacteria from duckweeds and other sources, and use these collections in large multifactorial experiments on an automated, high-throughput platform. The collections, results, and experimental methods will contribute to the development of microbial consortia that can enhance organismal and ecosystem resilience in the Anthropocene. 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.