Migration rates of desert soil nematodes under hyper-arid conditions
This would be my suggestion for the abstract: The availability of water is essential to support life and little is known about how the evolution of the landscape and that of living organisms interact under water scarcity. The Collaborative Research Centre CRC1211 (Earth - Evolution at the dry limit) is investigating this question by focusing on the life and adaptation of organisms under extreme drought. It investigates how organisms adapt spatio-temporally as well as geno- and phenotypically to changing environmental conditions. With this in mind, project B08 focuses on parthenogenesis and genomic diversity, mutation and migration rates, salinity tolerance, and anhydrobiosis. These adaptations can form further hypotheses for the adaptation of organisms to environmental changes under the aspect of climate change. Nematodes are the most abundant animals on earth and can be found almost everywhere. They occur in almost all habitable areas of the world and can be optimally used as indicators of environmental changes. Analyzing the adaptation of nematodes to their environment (e.g. pollution, temperature changes, altered mineral deposits) can thus serve as a monitoring tool for temporal and spatial as well as environmental changes. This makes them particularly suitable for use as indicators of environmental change.  The study 'Migration rates of desert soil nematodes under hyper-arid conditions' deals with the migration rate of free-living soil nematodes in the Atacama Desert and investigates whether dry conditions lead to a reduced movement of nematodes and thus to a lower dispersal and migration of populations. To analyze the migration rate, a defined area in the Atacama Desert was sampled at 16 locations in 2022. The nematodes occurring there were extracted from the soil samples and identified using Sanger sequencing. Based on these results, a haplotype network of the most abundant genus (Acrobeles, n=105) was created. The network resulted in four large haplotype clusters, three of which showed a very low substitution rate among each other. From each of these three clusters, 15 nematodes were selected for whole genome sequencing using ILLUMINA sequencing. The sequences will be assembled and in addition, mapped to a reference genome. F-statistics (fixation index, FST) and other population genetic parameter estimation will be applied to the sequenced genomes to analyze the migration rates. The results may shed light on how nematodes are adapted to drought and help to understand the interplay between geographical barriers and species migration.
This would be my suggestion for the abstract: The availability of water is essential to support life and little is known about how the evolution of the landscape and that of living organisms interact under water scarcity. The Collaborative Research Centre CRC1211 (Earth - Evolution at the dry limit) is investigating this question by focusing on the life and adaptation of organisms under extreme drought. It investigates how organisms adapt spatio-temporally as well as geno- and phenotypically to changing environmental conditions. With this in mind, project B08 focuses on parthenogenesis and genomic diversity, mutation and migration rates, salinity tolerance, and anhydrobiosis. These adaptations can form further hypotheses for the adaptation of organisms to environmental changes under the aspect of climate change. Nematodes are the most abundant animals on earth and can be found almost everywhere. They occur in almost all habitable areas of the world and can be optimally used as indicators of environmental changes. Analyzing the adaptation of nematodes to their environment (e.g. pollution, temperature changes, altered mineral deposits) can thus serve as a monitoring tool for temporal and spatial as well as environmental changes. This makes them particularly suitable for use as indicators of environmental change.  The study 'Migration rates of desert soil nematodes under hyper-arid conditions' deals with the migration rate of free-living soil nematodes in the Atacama Desert and investigates whether dry conditions lead to a reduced movement of nematodes and thus to a lower dispersal and migration of populations. To analyze the migration rate, a defined area in the Atacama Desert was sampled at 16 locations in 2022. The nematodes occurring there were extracted from the soil samples and identified using Sanger sequencing. Based on these results, a haplotype network of the most abundant genus (Acrobeles, n=105) was created. The network resulted in four large haplotype clusters, three of which showed a very low substitution rate among each other. From each of these three clusters, 15 nematodes were selected for whole genome sequencing using ILLUMINA sequencing. The sequences will be assembled and in addition, mapped to a reference genome. F-statistics (fixation index, FST) and other population genetic parameter estimation will be applied to the sequenced genomes to analyze the migration rates. The results may shed light on how nematodes are adapted to drought and help to understand the interplay between geographical barriers and species migration.
TUM School of Life Sciences