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Project
Microbial metacommunity ecology: lineage sorting, dispersion and evolution in the water columnbiofilm ecotone of shallow lakes.
Bacterial communities are essential for the functioning of natural ecosystems (e.g. nutrient cycling), play an important role in all kinds of industrial processes (e.g. biological wastewater treatment, food fermentation), and can cause severe (economical) damage (e.g. pathogens, biofouling, food spoilage). Nevertheless, the ecological processes determining the species composition of natural bacterial communities are insufficiently known. Do specific local environmental conditions always lead to thesame predictable community composition due to strong lineage sorting (i.e. local selection by biotic and abiotic factors)? And what is the relative importance of processes at the metacommunity level, such as dispersion, immigration history and evolution?
During this research wewill quantify the relative importance of lineage sorting, mass effects,priority effects and evolution for the structuring of bacterial communities and investigate the impact of differential community composition onfunctionality. Natural planktonic and biofilm communities from different pond types will be exposed to each other under specific experimental setups, such as a gradient of artificial dispersion (mass effects) or different immigration histories (priority effects). Bacterial community composition will be analyzed by t-RFLP and 454-pyrosequencing followed by multivariate statistical analyses. By using natural communities sampled from shallow lakes insight will be gained in the processes occurring in species rich systems, thus maximizing the relevance of this research for applied microbiology.
During this research wewill quantify the relative importance of lineage sorting, mass effects,priority effects and evolution for the structuring of bacterial communities and investigate the impact of differential community composition onfunctionality. Natural planktonic and biofilm communities from different pond types will be exposed to each other under specific experimental setups, such as a gradient of artificial dispersion (mass effects) or different immigration histories (priority effects). Bacterial community composition will be analyzed by t-RFLP and 454-pyrosequencing followed by multivariate statistical analyses. By using natural communities sampled from shallow lakes insight will be gained in the processes occurring in species rich systems, thus maximizing the relevance of this research for applied microbiology.
Date:1 Oct 2011 → 8 Jan 2016
Keywords:Metacommunity ecology, Aquatic ecosystems, Eco-evolutionary dynamics, Priority effect, Mass effect, Dispersal limitation, Prokaryotes, Lineage sorting
Disciplines:Geology, Aquatic sciences, challenges and pollution, Animal biology, Fisheries sciences
Project type:PhD project