Keystone mutualisms: understanding the role of fungi in organizing soil bacterial food webs
EMSL Project ID
51394
Abstract
The goal of our project is to create a predictive understanding of how fungi structure soil bacterial foodwebs. We will do this through an experiment designed around what is one of the fundamental axes of natural biotic variation encountered by bacteria in soils -- the presence of mycorrhizal fungi. Specifically, we will test the hypothesis that mycorrhizal associations control bacterial foodwebs by regulating the quantity and quality of fixed carbon entering the soil through roots. Although a great deal of new information is accumulating about the mechanisms by which fungi and bacteria interact, natural communities are too complex to directly study all possible interactions. Rather, our goal is to determine how a key axis of biotic variation creates predictable structure to these interactions in a way that can be scaled across ecosystems. In particular, we expect that the presence of ectomycorrhizal fungi - which physically encase plant roots - will change the quality, quantity, and spatial distribution of C flux to soils compared to naked roots or arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, selecting for different bacterial taxa. Successfully testing this hypothesis requires the use of novel technical capabilities at EMSL that will allow us to quantify changes in soil metabolomes and proteomes in the presence of different mycorrhizal fungi, to visualize the spatial distribution of metabolites around mycorrhizal roots, and to visualize the spatial distribution of plant derived C through mycorrhizal hyphal networks. Because we have shown in a previous study that the distribution of the different types of mycorrhizal associations that we will investigate change predictably with climate, our microcosm findings can scale-up across global soil biomes. In doing so, our work has the potential to create a novel framework for predicting variation in a key biological interaction that influences rates of carbon and nutrient cycling in ecosystems
Project Details
Project type
Large-Scale EMSL Research
Start Date
2020-10-01
End Date
2022-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members