Project description:The availability of organic carbon represents a major bottleneck for the development of soil microbial communities and the regulation of microbially-mediated ecosystem processes. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on how the lifestyle and population abundances are physiologically regulated by the availability of energy and organic carbon in soil ecosystems. To date, functional insights into the lifestyles of microbial populations have been limited by the lack of straightforward approaches to the tracking of the active microbial populations. Here, by the use of an comprehensiv metaproteomics and genomics, we reveal that C-availability modulates the lifestyles of bacterial and fungal populations in drylands and determines the compartmentalization of functional niches. This study highlights that the active diversity (evaluated by metaproteomics) but not the diversity of the whole microbial community (estimated by genome profiling) is modulated by the availability of carbon and is connected to the ecosystem functionality in drylands.
Project description:The Global Diversity lines are a resource collection of 87 strains of Drosophila melanogaster (Grenier JK et al 2015. PMID 25673134). In this experiment, whole adult flies from the Global Diversity Lines (87 inbred lines derived from natural populations) were profiled using a spotted-oligo microarray to determine natural variation in gene expression patterns.
Project description:DNA methylation alters the epigenetic landscape of the genome, plays critical roles in regulating gene expression, and ensures transposon silencing. As evidenced by the numerous defects associated with aberrant DNA methylation landscapes, establishing proper tissue-specific methylation patterns is critical. Yet, how such differences arise remains a largely open question in both plants and animals. Here we demonstrate that four CLASSY proteins (CLSY1-4), which are differentially expressed during plant development, play major roles in controlling tissue-specific DNA methylation patterns. Depending on the tissue, the genetic requirements for specific CLSYs differ significantly and on a global scale, certain clsy mutants are sufficient to largely shift the epigenetic landscape between tissues. Together, these findings not only reveal substantial epigenetic diversity between tissues, but assign these changes to specific CLSY proteins, revealing how locus-specific targeting combined with tissue-specific expression enables the CLSYs to generate epigenetic diversity during plant development.