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Spatio-Temporal Dynamics Of Fungal Communities And Their Effects On Plants, Kel Cook Nov 2020

Spatio-Temporal Dynamics Of Fungal Communities And Their Effects On Plants, Kel Cook

Biology ETDs

Fungi perform several critical functions in the environment. Spatiotemporal distributions of fungal communities will mediate when and where these functions happen and how they vary across the landscape. I first explored tropical tree canopy fungal community variation at small spatial scales and documented near total turnover of fungi across sub-meter distances and among adjacent substrates. The second chapter analyzed fungal turnover over the course of three years, where community stability was driven primarily by abundant fungi. In the third chapter, I tested effects of the environment, including host plant and habitat, on canopy fungal communities and found only small effects, …


From Genes To Ecosystems: Resource Availability And Dna Methylation Drive The Diversity And Abundance Of Restriction Modification Systems In Prokaryotes, Spiridon E. Papoulis Jun 2020

From Genes To Ecosystems: Resource Availability And Dna Methylation Drive The Diversity And Abundance Of Restriction Modification Systems In Prokaryotes, Spiridon E. Papoulis

Doctoral Dissertations

Together, prokaryotic hosts and their viruses numerically dominate the planet and are engaged in an eternal struggle of hosts evading viral predation and viruses overcoming defensive mechanisms employed by their hosts. Prokaryotic hosts have been found to carry several viral defense systems in recent years with Restriction Modification systems (RMs) were the first discovered in the 1950s. While we have biochemically elucidated many of these systems in the last 70 years, we still struggle to understand what drives their gain and loss in prokaryotic genomes. In this work, we take a computational approach to understand the underlying evolutionary drivers of …


High-Throughput Two-Stage Dereplication Of Cave Bacteria To Discover Novel Antibiotic Compounds, Alexander Archey Jan 2020

High-Throughput Two-Stage Dereplication Of Cave Bacteria To Discover Novel Antibiotic Compounds, Alexander Archey

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Since their discovery over a century ago, antibiotics have been a staple of combating infectious diseases. However, bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics through a variety of mechanisms. Efforts to identify new antibiotics often fail by discovering already-known antibiotics, or failing to synthesize new antibiotics that are safe for clinical use. The aim of this research was to dereplicate bacteria- to screen for antibiotic production in- normally isolated in cave ecosystems. Using two new technologies, the Antibiotic Resistance Platform (ARP) and a data acquisition and bioinformatics technique (IDBac), my dereplicating method allowed high throughput of bacterial screening for antibiotics. In this …