| 项目编号: | 1406770
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| 项目名称: | DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The ax and wedge of competition shapes symbiont diversity |
| 作者: | Bryan Brown
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| 承担单位: | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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| 批准年: | 2013
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| 开始日期: | 2014-06-01
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| 结束日期: | 2015-05-31
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| 资助金额: | USD20668
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| 资助来源: | US-NSF
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| 项目类别: | Standard Grant
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| 国家: | US
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| 语种: | 英语
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| 特色学科分类: | Biological Sciences - Environmental Biology
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| 英文关键词: | symbiont diversity
; diversity
; competition
; organism
; local biodiversity
; symbiosis
; symbiont
; local diversity
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| 英文摘要: | The term symbiosis has many technical and non-technical definitions, but here symbiosis simply means that the lives of two species are intimately linked by exchanges of resources and services or provisioning of habitat, such as when one organism lives on or inside another. Most plants and animals are engaged in symbioses. In many cases, organisms cannot live without their symbionts. Moreover, the life of an organism may depend on many kinds of symbiotic interactions with many kinds of symbionts. For instance, human nutrition, development, and immune function depend on interactions with thousands of internal and external bacterial species. However, current symbiosis theories cannot account for the evolution and maintenance of diversity in symbiont communities. The proposed project will explore patterns of ecological and evolutionary similarities among species of worms which live in symbiosis with crayfish to show how competition among symbionts can limit symbiont diversity by excluding less competitive species, but also create diversity by favoring the evolution of new symbiont species. Because symbiont diversity is often necessary for an organism?s survival, an understanding of symbiont diversity is needed to predict the fate of many species in a rapidly changing world. Therefore this work will have far-reaching implications for disparate fields such as conservation, epidemiology, and agriculture. The proposed work includes a collaboration with Dr. Mike Rosenzweig, director of the Seek Education, Explore, and DiScover (SEEDS) program as part of the Virginia Tech Biological Science Outreach. The investigators will disseminate their findings through public lectures and demonstrations at the Price House Nature Center in Blacksburg, Virginia. These activities will raise public awareness of the intriguing symbioses that occur just beyond their back door and provide a first-hand experience with charismatic native species.
Competition may play a dual role in shaping local biodiversity; it can limit local diversity through competitive exclusion, or it can create diversity through disruptive selection. Observation of contemporary patterns alone cannot distinguish these processes because both yield similar patterns. The proposed
work will extend beyond contemporary patterns of symbiont assemblages to search phylogenetic
history for evidence of the evolutionary processes that create and shape symbiont diversity. The researchers will do this by combining ecological data of functional traits and broad scale assessment of patterns in biodiversity with a phylogenetic reconstruction of evolutionary history using genetic sequence data, in order to elucidate the evolutionary processes that create symbiont diversity.
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| 资源类型: | 项目
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| 标识符: | http://119.78.100.158/handle/2HF3EXSE/96795
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| Appears in Collections: | 影响、适应和脆弱性
气候减缓与适应
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| Recommended Citation: | |
Bryan Brown. DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The ax and wedge of competition shapes symbiont diversity. 2013-01-01.
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