NSF Award
2430384
In recent years there has been a growing understanding of microbes’ potentials to address societal challenges, from ecosystem sustainability to public health to industrial production. Microbial functions often happen in communities of multiple microbial types, and to assemble and maintain such communities, it is important to know how to add a microbe of interest to an existing community and how to protect a community from invaders. However, developing this know-how is hard because of the complexity of natural communities: there are often many microbial types and how they affect each other is often poorly understood. In this project, a simplified microbial community of microbes usually present in the human nose is used as a laboratory model to study what allows a microbe to establish into an existing community. For this, mathematical models of biological communities along with quantitative microbiology experiments will be used to clarify how microbial interactions determine whether newcomers into an existing community succeed or fail. Insights developed in this project teach us more about how microbial communities work and allow us to design and control such communities for a wide range of applications, including recycling waste products, preventing human diseases, and producing valuable compounds using microbes. <br/><br/>Biological invasion—a new organism colonizing a resident community—can be a major driving force for community restructuring and can be desired (e.g. when introducing probiotic/biocontrol strains) or undesired (e.g. when encountering pathogens). An improved understanding of how underlying processes such as species interaction can determine the invasion outcomes will enable us to implement biocontrol strategies in ecosystem sustainability, industrial bioproduction, and human health. Despite many previous studies of invasion, the know-how of designing effective interventions to alter invasion outcomes is still missing. The goal of this project is to investigate how invasion outcomes are influenced by species interactions such as competition for resources or facilitation/inhibition via metabolic byproducts. Through a combination of mathematical modeling and experimental validation using laboratory communities of nasal bacteria, three fundamental questions will be investigated: (1) Can changing the overall nutrient availability influence invasion outcomes? (2) Is estimating ecological interactions from community dynamics sufficient to predict invasion outcomes? (3) Are there critical interactions that control invasion outcomes? In addition to these scientific discoveries, the project contributes to training interdisciplinary researchers, developing community resources such as public blogs and databases, and raising awareness in the general public about the power of harnessing microbial potentials. This project is supported by the Systems and Synthetic Biology Cluster of the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
