EPSCoR Research Fellows: NSF: Linking microbial metabolic networks to ecosystem-scale fluxes in coastal mangroves with a multi-omics and ML/AI approach

This Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) EPSCoR Research Fellows project provides a fellowship to an Assistant Professor and training for a graduate student at Mississippi State University. This work is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Emily Graham at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Through the fellowship, the PI will investigate how microorganisms contribute to important functions like carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycling in the mangrove ecosystems of the Florida Everglades. The PI will gain expertise in generating high-resolution molecular datasets from field samples and developing powerful computational workflows to generate novel insights. This project will enhance the understanding of how microbial functions are regulated across habitats and seasons in mangroves, which provide ecosystem services like clean water and coastal stabilization. The work will enhance STEM capacity for high-dimensional data generation and analysis, and will generate new strategies for managing microbial functioning in mangroves, which are prone to frequent disturbances like hurricanes. The project addresses knowledge gaps at the interface between microbial communities and ecosystem functions along coastal environmental gradients. The project will investigate how microbial functional genes, transcripts, and metabolic networks vary in the highly productive mangrove ecosystems in the Florida Everglades. By generating metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, and metabolomic data from mangrove soils, porewater, and estuarine channel water during wet and dry seasons at the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, the researchers will develop machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)-based analyses to synthesize high dimensional datasets and infer how microbial controls (at the genetic, regulatory, or metabolic levels) relate to concurrent and long-term field measurements of ecosystem functions. The project will expand the PI’s expertise in environmental multi-omics analysis, provide training and networking opportunities for the graduate student, and increase computational resources at the home institution to accommodate data analysis. The PI will develop a course on environmental metabolomics and multi-omics integration that will disseminate knowledge and expand research capacity at the home institution. This project is supported by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: EPSCoR Research Fellows (ERF). The ERF program supports early- and mid-career investigators in eligible jurisdictions to develop collaborations at the nation’s private, government or academic research institutions. 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.