Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/R001529/1
Evolution of thaumarchaeotal metabolism under contrasting oxygen conditions
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor C Gubry-Rangin, University of Aberdeen, Inst of Biological and Environmental Sci
- Co-Investigator:
- Dr T Williams, University of Bristol, Biological Sciences
- Grant held at:
- University of Aberdeen, Inst of Biological and Environmental Sci
- Science Area:
- Atmospheric
- Earth
- Freshwater
- Marine
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Panel C
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Pollution and Waste
- Science Topics:
- Environmental Microbiology
- Environmental Genomics
- Abstract:
- Many of the important ecological processes essential for life on earth and for the sustainability of our environment are performed by microbes (the bacteria and archaea) that are astonishingly abundant and diverse on the planet. Their functional diversity has arisen through many millions of years of adaptation to environmental change. Despite the contribution of microbial activity to global nutrient cycles and environmental stability, our inability to grow most microbes in the laboratory has severely limited our understanding of the ways in which they adapt to change and evolve. Recent technological innovations remove this limitation and allow us to study adaptation in microbes. The first innovation is the ability to sequence genomes of microscopic single cells extracted from the environment, allowing identification of genetic changes involved in adaptation and inference of how genomes have changed through deep evolutionary time. The second is the use of this genetic information to improve our ability to cultivate microbes, enabling physiological studies. This project aims to use these cutting-edge technological advances to answer key questions about the mechanisms that generate this vast microbial functional diversity in nature, one of the greatest and most exciting challenges in biology. It will focus on a microbial group, the Thaumarchaeota, which are very diverse and abundant and have enormous environmental and economic impacts because of their role in oxidising ammonia fertilisers (resulting in greenhouse gas production and annual loss of >$70 billion of nitrogen fertilisers). As not all Thaumarchaeota perform ammonia oxidation, it is important to understand the distribution and activity of other Thaumarchaeota in the environment. This project will therefore address important environmental concerns about soil security and environmental change. In this project, soil will be incubated at varying oxygen concentrations to determine the Thaumarchaeota that are active under different conditions. Novel thaumarchaeotal genomes will be extracted from soils with different oxygen preferences using a cutting-edge technology, single-cell genomics, which enables sequencing of the genome of individual microscopic cells. This will establish the genetic basis for the differences in these oxygen preferences. We will compare these new genomes with those previously available to trace the evolutionary origin of the genes and metabolic pathways implicated. We will test our evolutionary inferences using physiological studies of laboratory cultures, using novel techniques and genomic information, to isolate organisms never previously grown in the laboratory. Finally, the relative abundance and activity of these groups will be assessed in several ecosystems to determine their ecological relevance. The project will address the crucial and exciting scientific and technological challenge of understanding the processes leading to the enormous functional diversity of microbes in terrestrial ecosystems, and will have broad environmental and socio-economic impact. It will increase our ability to predict the impact of environmental change on microbial diversity and ecosystem functions and will ensure better management of soil by facilitating the development of improved strategies for fertilisation utilisation and reduced greenhouse gas production. As the microbes studied in this proposal are unexplored, limited current information is available but their role in biogeochemical cycles and potential involvement in plant-microbe interactions is likely, offering novel scope of environmental and ecosystem understanding. Through various events, the scientific findings of this project will be disseminated to the public of all ages and to governing bodies and policy makers to communicate the importance of understanding adaptation in the face of environmental change and the need for better management of natural capital for ecosystem services.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/R001529/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Standard Grant FEC
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Standard Grant
This grant award has a total value of £519,259
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| DI - Other Costs | Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Estate Costs | DI - Staff | DI - T&S | DA - Other Directly Allocated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £90,440 | £124,388 | £43,169 | £237,710 | £14,383 | £9,168 |
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