Project description
How the gut microbiome of birds helps their climate adaptation
The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in maintaining health, yet much of the research is confined to laboratory animal models. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the microbiome’s function, data from wild populations and species are essential. With this in mind, the ERC-funded MiMeRe project focuses on wild birds to investigate how their gut microbiome aids in adapting to temperature variations induced by climate change. The project aims to achieve several objectives, including elucidating how the microbiome influences the host’s response to temperature fluctuations, examining underlying epigenetic modifications, and analysing the molecular mechanisms of host-microbiome interactions. Advanced techniques such as microbiome transplants, quantitative genetics, and multivariate phylogenetic models will be employed to investigate the causal role of microbiomes in these processes.
Objective
The gut microbiome is strongly linked to health and sickness. A current key challenge is to understand how the microbiome helps the host adapt to environmental variation. Yet, most research originates from few laboratory animal models and thus misses large parts of environmental, physiological and life-history variation, while data from wild populations and species is needed. Thus, our overarching aim is to unravel how the microbiome mediates hosts responses to environmental variation, covering molecular to evolutionary scale, using wild birds as a study system. We focus on how gut microbiome helps hosts to cope with temperature variation, given the pervasiveness of temperature as a challenge across taxa, and climate-crisis driven thermal challenges. The objectives:
(O1) To study the role of the microbiome in mediating host (adaptive) reversible thermal plasticity in adulthood
(O2) To assess the role of the microbiome in mediating host (adaptive) developmental and transgenerational thermal plasticity, and explore the underlying epigenetic changes
(O3) To quantify the contribution of host genetic variation and the microbiome on host thermal physiology
(O4) To explore the macroevolutionary patterns of microbiome and host thermal physiology
(O5) To examine the underlying molecular mediators of host-microbiome interactions
To understand the causal role of microbiome, we apply state-of-the-art methods (incl. microbiome transplants) within and across populations (O1) and generations (O2), and identify the molecular mediators (incl. bacterial vesicles; O5), many tools adapted from the biomedical field to eco-evo research. We further use quantitative genetics, reaction norms, selection lines (O3) and multivariate phylogenetic models (O4), rarely used in host-microbiome field, opening new lines of research. We produce ground-breaking findings on the microbiome-mediated mechanisms of phenotypic variation, which helps to predict how organisms respond to anthropog
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
40100 Jyvaskyla
Finland