Project Details
Projekt
Impact of predatory Myxobacteria on soil microbiome complexity, energy flux and necromass quality.
Applicant
Professor Dr. Tim Urich
Subject Area
Soil Sciences
Microbial Ecology and Applied Microbiology
Microbial Ecology and Applied Microbiology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465127669
Soils host the most complex communities on Earth and are vital resources that provide essential ecosystem services and food security to humankind. Due to the complexity of soils, and the immense organismic diversity explicit links between microbiome composition (both taxonomical and functional), microbial physiology and energy fluxes has not been achieved for any soil to date. In fact, there was no single method to assess soil microbiota and soil fauna diversity, abundance and community composition at high taxonomic resolution. Double-RNA metatranscriptomics now enables such holistic census studies across phylogenetic domains and trophic levels based on rRNA and mRNA. This has the potential to establish mechanistic links between trophic interactions in the microbiome and energy and carbon fluxes along the bacterial and fungal energy channels. MYXED-UP 2 proposes the investigation of a neglected group of microorganisms in the soil food web: the predatory bacteria. We want to explicitly identify the role of predatory Myxobacteria in soil food web and their capacity to modulate the microbiome, as well as energy and matter fluxes. For this purpose we have teamed up with an interdisciplinary consortium of four researchers from soil biology, biogeochemistry, microbiology, modelling which will face the challenge by a unique combination of expertise along central laboratory experiments. We will assess the impact of Nematode and Myxobacteria grazing onto microbiome structure and energy and matter fluxes in experiments with natural microbial consortia. The highly integrated experiments will provide rich and heterogenous datasets that will ultimately fuel into modelling of microbial growth and turnover of specific functional guilds in the microcosms. In the framework of the joint research, MYXED-UP2 will provide broad insight into microbiomes using quantitative metatranscriptomics, that will establish links between microbiome members and thermodynamics. In work package 2, we aim to understand the impact of the death pathways (predatory Myxobacteria vs. bacteriophages) onto the composition of bacterial and fungal necromass.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
