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Nanofauna (flagellates, amoebae) diversity in relation to land use and ecosystem functioning NANOFAUNA DIVERSITY (NANOFAUN)

Fachliche Zuordnung Ökologie und Biodiversität der Pflanzen und Ökosysteme
Förderung Förderung von 2008 bis 2017
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 61376191
 
Erstellungsjahr 2017

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

The project with 2 Co-PIs (H. Arndt and M. Bonkowski) was designed to reflect the taxonomic expertise of our respective groups. While the Arndt group focused on flagellate taxonomy, our expertise was on amoeboid protists. Our major aim in the first funding phase was the establishment of a high-throughput sequencing technique to quantify the amoeboid protists, especially in the phylum Amoebozoa. Major challenges had to be overcome: i) it was impossible to generate a reliable reference database from public databases, and we had to assemble our own reference data base by isolating, cultivating and sequencing hundreds of amoeboid taxa – and doing proper taxonomy on them as well. 2) I underestimated the challenges of primer design for Amoebozoa due to their extreme variability in the conserved regions of their SSU sequence. 3) The bioinformatics pipelines for data analysis also needed to be established. For example, we developed a method based on the coamplification of a well-characterized ‘mock’ community to clearly define the cut-off values for OTU assignment. 4) With the change from Roche 454 to Illumina sequencing, again new primers had to be designed and new bioinformatic pipelines had to be established. At the end of the first funding phase, all the prerequisites for our first HTS survey were in place: We had a reference data base, we had specific primers for Acanthamoeba, and we had established a close collaboration with Tesfaye Wubet in the Buscot group to solve the bioinformatic challenges. We are now one of the few groups worldwide that have the tools ready to describe the large uncultivated protist diversity in soils and to gain data on protist diversity on a scale suitable to sequence all 150 plots in the grasslands and forest ecosystems at the same time. Currently we have primers to cover Myxomycets and Acanthamoeba in the Amoebozoa, and the large group of Cercozoa. Primers for Oomycetes will follow. Now our data can complement the data on fungi (Buscot/Wubet) and bacteria, and it is agreed in the MicroSYTeM subproject that we will calculate microbial co-occurrence networks with the aim to uncover for the first time multitrophic connections between bacteria, protists and fungi in grassland soils.The MicroSYTeM subproject is also where we hope to get statistical support for the spatial modelling of protist distribution and protist-bacteria-fungi co-occurrence and SEM in the SCALEMIC project.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

Zusatzinformationen

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