The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | eng |
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123706 |
| _version_ | 1826199934838243328 |
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| author | Yu, Xiaoqian,Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. |
| author2 | Eric J. Alm. |
| author_facet | Eric J. Alm. Yu, Xiaoqian,Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. |
| author_sort | Yu, Xiaoqian,Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:28:25Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | mit-1721.1/123706 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:28:25Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1237062020-02-11T03:21:19Z The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates Yu, Xiaoqian,Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eric J. Alm. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biology. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biology Biology. This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Biology, 2019 Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 105-112). Microbes form diverse and complex communities to influence the health and function of all ecosystems on earth. However, key ecological and evolutionary processes that allow microbial communities to form and maintain their diversity, and how this diversity further affects ecosystem function, are largely underexplored. This is especially true for natural microbial communities that harbor large numbers of species whose interactions are often the result of long term evolutionary processes of co-occurring organisms. In this thesis, I make use of "common garden experiments" -- introducing varying microbial communities to the same environments -- to investigate how the assembly and functions of natural microbial communities are affected by the diversity of communities, as well as the chemical nature of substrates that they assemble on. In the first project, I present an experimental workflow that streamlines the generation of self-assembled microbial communities with a wide range of diversity, measurements of community function in "common gardens", followed by subsequent isolation of the most abundant taxa from these communities via dilution-to-extinction. This high-throughput workflow is applied to assess how interactions scale with organismal diversity to affect the function of microbial communities from the coastal ocean. In the second project, I use a combination of theoretical models and an ex vivo experimental framework to examine how the volume and content of gas produced by gut microbiota assembling on different prebiotic substrates ("gardens") are influenced by the chemical nature of the substrate and the composition of the gut microbiota itself. As a whole, this body of work represents a small step towards finding common organization principles in microbial community assembly and their functional consequences. by Xiaoqian Yu. Ph. D. Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Biology 2020-02-10T21:37:14Z 2020-02-10T21:37:14Z 2019 2019 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123706 1138020377 eng MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 112 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| spellingShingle | Biology. Yu, Xiaoqian,Ph.D.Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| title | The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| title_full | The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| title_fullStr | The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| title_full_unstemmed | The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| title_short | The assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| title_sort | assembly and functions of microbial communities on complex substrates |
| topic | Biology. |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123706 |
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