Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/J019151/1
Evolutionary adaptation in Archaea
Fellowship Award
- Fellow:
- Professor C Gubry-Rangin, University of Aberdeen, Inst of Biological and Environmental Sci
- Grant held at:
- University of Aberdeen, Inst of Biological and Environmental Sci
- Science Area:
- Freshwater
- Marine
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Soil science
- Population Ecology
- Environmental Microbiology
- Responses to environment
- Environmental Genomics
- Abstract:
- Biological diversity is vast in the majority of natural environments and, globally, is essential for the maintenance of ecosystem function. High diversity is believed to have arisen from adaptation to the myriad of structured environmental and biotic niches and specialisation to alternative resources. Diversity reflects the interaction between evolution and ecology, as organisms adapt to environmental change to create biological diversity, which, in turn, is selected for maintenance of ecosystem function. Therefore, adaptation is an evolutionary process of crucial importance to life on earth. Microorganisms (comprising two of the three domains of life, namely the bacteria and the archaea) are the most abundant organisms on earth and three mechanisms are seen as important in the process of microbial adaptation: recombination, allowing lateral exchange (gain or loss) of genetic material; positive selection, favouring the increase of advantageous mutations; and differential expression of the genes. Microorganisms are useful organisms to study adaptation to the environment due to their short generation time, their small genome and their small size. The thaumarchaea represent a significant proportion of prokaryotic abundance in mesophilic environments and play an important role in the global biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen. They are responsible for nitrate leaching and nitrous oxide production, participating in both greenhouse gas production and water/soil pollution, and thus play an important ecological role. Of all the abiotic factors investigated in terrestrial environments, pH appears to have the strongest influence on thaumarchaeal community composition at three spatial scales (world-wide, UK-wide and on a agricultural pH plot) in different ecosystems. Therefore, thaumarchaea represent a good model for studying adaptation to the environment and two main approaches will be targeted in this proposal. First, the limited number of cultivated thaumarchaea has seriously limited knowledge on these organisms, but development of new technologies such as single-cell sequencing will enable comparison of their genomes using an approach that does not require laboratory cultivation. Genome sequencing of cells obtained from soils with different pH will be developed and used to compare their levels of recombination and selection, in order to understand why and how thaumarchaea are influenced by pH. Second, an experimental evolution approach will be adopted to drive evolution of the thaumarchaea in the laboratory under different tightly controlled pH pressure in order to analyse their adaptation. Thaumarchaea will be compared after growth for 2.5, to assess their evolutionary adaptation over time and as a function of different pH regimes. This will provides answers to key questions on the speed of evolution, on their specialization and on the genomic basis of adaptation. This project will be the first to analyse adaptation of terrestrial thaumarchaea by recombination and selection and will also be the first long-term evolution experiment on archaea. It will therefore impact on our understanding of the links between ecology and evolution of a microbial group important in agriculture, water and environmental pollution, and will also inform ecological and evolutionary studies of other important environmental microorganisms.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/J019151/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Postdoctoral Fellow (FEC)
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Postdoctoral Fellowship
This fellowship award has a total value of £246,691
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| DI - Other Costs | Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Estate Costs | DI - Staff | DA - Other Directly Allocated | DI - T&S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £16,849 | £84,217 | £12,933 | £104,107 | £17,432 | £11,153 |
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