Flexible until it snaps: Dynamics of genes & traits, densities & diversity in communities challenged by environmental change

Investigators: Daniela Beisser & Sven Rahmann
Collaborators: Jens Boenigk and Christina Bock (Biodiversity, Essen), Bernd Sures (Essen) and Matthijs Vos (Theoretical and Applied Biodiversity, Bochum)
Funding: DFG Priority Programme SPP 1704 "Flexibility matters: Interplay between trait diversity and ecological dynamics using aquatic communities as model systems" (Dynatrait)

Our project focuses on dynamic responses to environmental stressors, specifically to ionic silver, and on the effect of such stressors to constrain the communities ability to dynamically respond to additional stressors such as heat waves. We combine classical morphological and ecophysiological analyses with (meta-)transcriptome analyses based on high throughput sequencing technologies.

In this project, we

1. identify key responses of the target organisms and the dynamics of single species upon varying levels of stressors,
2. identify the dynamics and feedbacks between genes and traits, densities and diversity of low and high diversity model communities, and
3. identify the dynamics and feedbacks between genes and traits, densities and diversity at the community level in the presence of herbivore grazing pressure.

The Genome Informatics group analyses the metatranscriptome and transcriptome sequences arising from the project. This includes construction of transcriptome assemblies of the target protist species, gene expression analyses and metatranscriptome analyses under varying conditions and to develop approaches to link the results to trait-based modelling.