The research conducted under the objectives of this funded project has been progressing successfully, yielding significant and publishable results in multiple areas.
We have identified various algal metabolites, including methylated compounds and vitamin D analogs, expanding our understanding of algal metabolism. These findings contributed to two major publications: Sperfeld et al. (2024) and Eliason et al. (2024). Additionally, we discovered that algae secrete inorganic nitrogen, a key process in nutrient dynamics and microbial interactions, which was published in Abada et al. (2023).
Our work also revealed bacterial nitric oxide secretion as a pathogenicity factor and characterized bacterial polysaccharides involved in biofilm formation, as detailed in Abada et al. (2023) and Lipsman et al. (2023), respectively. These findings highlight the role of microbial secretomes in modulating host-microbe interactions.
We demonstrated that bacterial communities exhibit altered pathogenic phenotypes when interacting with algae, as shown in Beiralas et al. (2023).
A major achievement is the creation of a novel dual RNA-Seq dataset, allowing for differential gene expression analysis in both algae and bacteria during co-cultivation. This dataset, alongside metabolomics analyses, provides insight into the molecular basis of algae-bacteria interactions, as detailed in Sperfeld et al. (2024).
We successfully introduced specific algal metabolites into bacterial cultures, leading to changes such as increased bacterial conjugation (Duchin Rapp et al., 2024), enhanced polysaccharide production (Lipsman et al., 2023), and accelerated bacterial growth during the lag phase (Sperfeld et al., 2024).
Our research uncovered a critical algal-bacterial-environmental circuit involving the methionine cycle, influencing both algal and bacterial metabolism (Sperfeld et al., 2024). Ongoing investigations focus on the role of inorganic hydrogen peroxide in these interactions.
We also demonstrated that increased UV exposure significantly affects the algal transcriptome and metabolome (Eliason et al., 2024), shedding light on algal stress responses and climate change adaptation. Elevated salinity was found to impact algal-bacterial interactions by increasing osmoprotectant production, as detailed in Sperfeld et al. (2024).
Additionally, we elucidated a previously unknown algal sterol biosynthesis pathway (Eliason et al., 2024), providing new insights into algal biochemistry and its ecological roles. Finally, we have made progress in collecting environmental samples, with the first batch retrieved for analysis of natural variability in algal-bacterial interactions.
