During the funding period, I have published 10 papers (including high-impact journals: Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Ecology Letters, Ecology, Biology Letters, etc). Others are either in Review or In Prep. I supervised: 3 postdocs, 2 full-time scientific assistants, 9 research assistants, 14 BSc thesis students, 13 MSc thesis students, and 2 hosted PhD students. I also led 3 successful field expeditions to the Panamanian rainforest at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
The research has fostered unanticipated basic & applied research applications leading to new grants. Key technical innovations include: 1) nutritional x stress landscapes which to resolve fundamental nutritional niches, 2) fundamental and realized nutritional niches to integrate between lab and field, 3) Temperature-nutrient interactions using a modified Q10 approach, and 4) discoveries about molecular and cellular mechanisms governing nutrient transfer in symbioses. I successfully integrated planned environment stressors (micronutrients, environmental toxins, crop pathogens, abiotic gradients) into nutrition x stress landscapes.
We disseminated at international scientific meetings, through and public engagement (e.g. Kulturnatten), media coverage, and a collaboration with the Copenhagen Zoo on leafcutter ants.
WP1 focused on "the molecular mechanisms governing crop performance" and used diverse molecular methods, bioinformatics tools, advanced imaging, and in vitro experiments (e.g. transcriptomics, metabolic pathway mapping, confocal microscopy) to discover how symbionts exchange nutrients.
WP2 focused on "Eco-physiological tradeoffs with crop domestication" and integrated field experiments in Panama, DNA barcoding to identify plant fragments, NIRS analyses to identify macronutrients (protein and carbohydrates) and elemental analyses (e.g. Zn, Ca, Mn, Fe, K, etc). This work validated the niche based approaches I proposed.
WP3 focused on explaining "How farming ants grow their crops in diverse habitats" and explored cultivar stress adaptations in the lab and in the field in Panama with a focus on toxic secondary metabolites in plant fragments and variable temperatures.
WP4 addressed the question "Have farming ants cracked eco-physiological domestication tradeoffs?". I assembled an international team to use DNA barcoding and microsatellites, field mapping and monitoring of colonies, nutritional analyses, In vitro studies, laboratory feeding experiments of whole farming colonies, and phylogenetic analyses. This work revealed fundamental tradeoffs between crop yield and vulnerability with potential lessons for farming systems of humans.
