Descrizione del progetto
Chiarire le ripercussioni più ampie della ridondanza funzionale sui microbi marini
Il progetto FROM, finanziato dall’UE, impiegherà set di dati sul microbioma all’avanguardia che abbracciano l’oceano globale per determinare il modo in cui la ridondanza funzionale influenza le comunità microbiche su ampia scala. Il ricercatore raffronterà le funzioni dedotte con la tassonomia microbica, la selezione ambientale da variabili abiotiche e la dispersione nell’oceano allo scopo di determinarne la ridondanza. Inoltre, verranno raccolte caratteristiche morfologiche di alcuni taxa di protisti all’interno di un nuovo set di dati che ne rappresenterà la diversità funzionale. Infine, verrà sviluppata un’innovativa caratterizzazione funzionale delle reti ecologiche al fine di svelare l’influenza reciproca esistente tra le reti interattive dei microbi e le condizioni ambientali. FROM rappresenta un grande balzo in avanti per la microbiologia e l’ecologia funzionale, mettendo in luce le modalità con cui i microbi possono influenzare gli ecosistemi naturali, ingegnerizzati o futuri.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinatore
28006 Madrid
Spagna