A mechanistic approach to understand the emergence of novel ecological interactions

Ecological interactions are ubiquitous in nature, and play an important role in dictating the ecological processes of a given community.

Having a greater understanding about these interactions can give us important insights into how species and communities evolve.

Thus, a lot of the research over the last century has focused on increasing our understanding about these ecological interactions.

However, the motivation behind these studies has often been to explain characteristics of an existing ecological interaction. This has resulted in a large gap in our understanding about how novel ecological interactions emerge.

Two important questions in this regard are 1) What ecological conditions result in species interacting with one another, and 2) What dictates whether these interactions turn out to be detrimental or beneficial.

These are important questions to investigate since answering these will increase our understanding about how species interactions are getting effected by a constantly changing environment.

This proposal presents an empirical framework to build a theory about environmental dependence of emergence of species interactions (hypothesis-generating step), and then empirically test its predictions (hypothesis-testing step).

More specifically, I will use a high-throughput experimental evolution approach to study interactions between different species of bacteria to predict and test how two species of bacteria will interact with each other in a given environment.