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The INstitute for Symbiotic Interactions, Training, and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate.
Interference competition, wherein bacteria actively antagonize and damage their microbial neighbors, is a key ecological strategy governing microbial community structure and composition. To gain a competitive edge, bacteria can deploy a diverse array of antimicrobial weapons—ranging from diffusible toxins to contact-mediated systems in order to eliminate their bacterial rivals.
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Biofilm formation is important for microbial survival, adaptation, and persistence within mutualistic and pathogenic systems in the Vibironaceae. Biofilms offer protection against environmental stressors, immune responses, and antimicrobial treatments by increasing host colonization and resilience. This review examines the mechanisms of biofilm formation in Vibrio species, focusing on quorum sensing, cyclic-di-GMP signaling, and hostspecific adaptations that influence biofilm structure and function.
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The Vibrio fischeri—Euprymna scolopes symbiosis has become a powerful animal—microbe model system to examine the genetic underpinnings of symbiont development and regulation. Although there has been a number of elegant bacterial genetic technologies developed to examine this symbiosis, there is still a need to develop more sophisticated methodologies to better understand complex regulatory pathways that lie within the association.
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Cophylogenies represent coevolutionary histories of two or more sets of coevolved taxa, and are used to study coevolution and other fundamental evolutionary processes. As with traditional phylogenies, cophylogenies are primarily reconstructed using computational analysis of DNA and other biomolecular sequence data. An essential question concerns the reliability of reconstructed phylogenies and cophylogenies.
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Symbiotic marine bacteria that are transmitted through the environment are susceptible to abiotic factors (salinity, temperature, physical barriers) that can influence their ability to colonize their specific hosts. Given that many symbioses are driven by host specificity, environmentally transmitted symbionts are more susceptible to extrinsic factors depending on conditions over space and time.
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Life on Earth comprises prokaryotes and a broad assemblage of endosymbioses. The pages of Molecular Biology and Evolution and Genome Biology and Evolution have provided an essential window into how these endosymbiotic interactions have evolved and shaped biological diversity.
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Just as a phylogeny encodes the evolutionary relationships among a group of organisms, a cophylogeny represents the coevolutionary relationships among symbiotic partners.
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Chromosome-level genome assembly of the aster leafhopper (Macrosteles quadrilineatus) reveals the role of environment and microbial symbiosis in shaping pest insect genome evolution
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Through outreach to area schools and the opportunities afforded to undergraduates, INSITE and the affiliated faculty members are training the next generations of STEM scientists.
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Prof. Michele Nishiguchi (University of California Merced, USA) “Interpreting the road map between ecological and molecular boundaries using a squid-bacterial mutualism”
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Molecular and Cellular Biology Professor Michele “Nish” Nishiguchi has been inducted as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and was recently named president-elect for the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB).“Interpreting the road map between ecological and molecular boundaries using a squid-bacterial mutualism”
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Prof. Michele Nishiguchi (University of California Merced, USA) “Interpreting the road map between ecological and molecular boundaries using a squid-bacterial mutualism”
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UC Merced has received a $12.5 million grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the Biology Integration Institute (BII): INSITE — the INstitute for Symbiotic Interactions, Training and Education — a research collaborative that aims to expand the fundamental knowledge of symbioses and inform immediate and long-term conservation strategies in the face of climate change.
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From understanding the multifaceted transmission of disease to deciphering how living organisms adapt to harsh conditions, answering big questions in biology requires interdisciplinary research and scientists engaging and partnering with those from other fields of study.
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The most immediate organismal response to environmental change is acclimatization through plastic changes in physiology and behavior.
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The specific goal of Theme II is to extend the results of Theme I’s focus on the immediate impact of climate change on fitness and acclimatization to understand how our model systems will adapt and evolve to new environmental conditions over long-term exposure.
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The goal of Theme III is to create a generalizable framework that combines short-term acclimatization (Theme I) and long-term adaptability data and models (Theme II) to predict the effect of climate change across the closed-open-complex symbiosis spectrum for all species.
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