MiMeRe

The gut microbiome is strongly linked to health and sickness. A current key challenge is to understand how the microbiome helps the host adapt to environmental variation. Yet, most research originates from few laboratory animal models and thus misses large parts of environmental, physiological and life-history variation, while data from wild populations and species is needed. Thus, our overarching aim is to unravel how the microbiome mediates host’s responses to environmental variation, covering molecular to evolutionary scale, using wild birds as a study system. We focus on how gut microbiome helps hosts to cope with temperature variation, given the pervasiveness of temperature as a challenge across taxa, and climate-crisis driven thermal challenges. The objectives: (O1) To study the role of the microbiome in mediating host (adaptive) reversible thermal plasticity in adulthood (O2) To assess the role of the microbiome in mediating host (adaptive) developmental and transgenerational thermal plasticity, and explore the underlying epigenetic changes (O3) To quantify the contribution of host genetic variation and the microbiome on host thermal physiology (O4) To explore the macroevolutionary patterns of microbiome and host thermal physiology (O5) To examine the underlying molecular mediators of host-microbiome interactions To understand the causal role of microbiome, we apply state-of-the-art methods (incl. microbiome transplants) within and across populations (O1) and generations (O2), and identify the molecular mediators (incl. bacterial vesicles; O5), many tools adapted from the biomedical field to eco-evo research. We further use quantitative genetics, reaction norms, selection lines (O3) and multivariate phylogenetic models (O4), rarely used in host-microbiome field, opening new lines of research. We produce ground-breaking findings on the microbiome-mediated mechanisms of phenotypic variation, which helps to predict how organisms respond to anthropog

2024

2029