Descripción del proyecto
Arrojar luz sobre el efecto ampliado de la redundancia funcional en los microbios marinos
El proyecto FROM, financiado con fondos europeos, utilizará conjuntos de datos del microbioma de última generación, que abarcan el océano mundial, para determinar cómo influye la redundancia funcional en las comunidades microbianas a gran escala. La persona beneficiaria de la beca de investigación comparará las funciones inferidas con la taxonomía microbiana, la selección ambiental de las variables abióticas y la dispersión a través del océano para determinar su redundancia. Además, las características morfotrópicas de los taxones protistas conformarán una nueva base de datos que representará su diversidad funcional. Por último, se desarrollará una innovadora caracterización funcional de las redes ecológicas para revelar la interacción entre las redes de interacción microbiana y las condiciones ambientales. FROM representa un gran avance para la microbiología y la ecología funcional, puesto que revela cómo pueden influir los microbios en los ecosistemas naturales, de ingeniería o futuros.
Objetivo
This proposal relates to a recent debate of microbiology. Functional redundancy supposes that many taxa can realize the same functions. In this scenario, the composition of microbial communities could appear as a bad predictor of their effects on ecosystems. Functional redundancy among microbes has been suggested but also disproven, growing in a limiting debate for microbiology. Our project proposes an overview of microbial functions to answer to this debate. The innovation in our project consists in studying the ecology and redundancy of functions inferred by various methods. We will use state-of-the art microbiome datasets that spans the global ocean, enabling to study the impact of geographic scales on redundancy. The host and the candidate will bring together their complementary expertise on omics, statistics, microbes’ morphology, nutrition and interactions to compare for the first time the functionality of all microbial domains across the global ocean. Inferred functions will be analyzed against microbial taxonomy, environmental selection from abiotic variables and dispersal across the ocean to study their redundancy and ecological patterns. Novel cross-disciplinary tools will be developed that will expand the outreach of our project to research in omics (e.g. bioinformatics, computational biology), biogeochemistry, modelling, evolution or global changes. Morpho-trophic features of protistan taxa will be collected into a novel database that will represent their functional diversity. Finally, an innovative functional characterization of ecological networks will be developed to unveil the interplay between microbial interaction networks and environmental conditions. Researchers and policy-makers studying how microbes affects natural, engineered, or future ecosystems, will benefit from our project that represents a major leap forward for microbiology and functional ecology.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinador
28006 Madrid
España