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SFB 1535:  Microbial networking – from organelles to cross-kingdom communities

Subject Area Biology
Medicine
Term since 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458090666
 
Microbial life has a huge impact on human society determining our health, nutrition and the functioning of whole ecosystems. In nature, microorganisms do not live as autarkic units but interact and communicate with each other resulting in the exchange of nutrients and information, an active process we call “networking”. This microbial networking is operational at different scales ranging from intracellular endosymbionts to intercellular cross-kingdom communities. A highly evolved example of networking is displayed by organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts, where endosymbiotic bacterial cells gave up their individuality to become integral, but still semi-autonomous, parts of their eukaryotic hosts. At the community level, higher-order biological entities are formed that consist of prokaryotic and eukaryotic members and are commonly referred to as microbiomes. CRC MibiNet’s vision is to understand microbial networking in its full complexity to explain how organelles evolve and how microbiome functions emerge. Therefore, we address the establishment, maintenance and evolution of microbial networking from intracellular interactions of organelles or endosymbionts and their host cell (A projects) to intercellular interactions in cross-kingdom communities (B projects) using state-of-the-art in vivo approaches and metabolomics (Z projects). We propose that the physiological and metabolic state of each member determines the dynamic and spatial organisation of microbial networking. To address this hypothesis, we will uncover central hubs of the underlying networks to identify which metabolic, regulatory and physical interactions are predominant at different networking scales. At the metabolic level, we will initially focus on the essential micronutrient iron as well as the macronutrient carbon and its link to energy metabolism. We will follow a new approach using minimal invasive switches of gene functions to alter microbial interactions followed by in vivo monitoring of resulting metabolic changes and evaluation by computational methods to gain predictable designs of underlying concepts. CRC MibiNet will pursue a profound “learning from nature” strategy: fundamental principles and unifying concepts from natural examples of stable microbial interactions will be challenged by implementing them in the synthetic construction of designer organelles, endosymbionts and cross-kingdom communities. With the interdisciplinary training programme MibiNeⓍt, this CRC puts a special emphasis on the education of the next generation of microbiologists with important skills in data science and modelling enabling them to act at the interface between disciplines. Ultimately, the coordinated effort of CRC MibiNet will open up new horizons for the engineering of microbial networking for future medical, agricultural and biotechnological applications.
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