INTRADIV - Causes and consequences of prokaryotic intra-species diversification at the global scale

Microorganisms drive the essential biogeochemical cycles that sustain life on our planet, and are at the centre of many of the major challenges faced by human society.

As such, understanding the drivers of their distribution in space, time and across environmental gradients has become one of the most critical tasks in the field of microbial ecology.The state-of-the-art approach for studying environmental microorganisms is currently to reconstruct genomes from metagenomic datasets, and cluster those genomes into species based on their sequence similarity.

However, prokaryotic species have a high internal variability in terms of allelic composition and gene content.

This widely overlooked intra-species diversity can substantially affect the dynamics of species and ecosystems, but its origin, extent and consequences are still poorly understood.

It is thus necessary to move past the theoretical work and small scale experiments and achieve a truly global (geographically and phylogenetically) characterization of prokaryotic intra-species diversity.INTRADIV aims to shed light on the causes and consequences of intra-species diversification, bridging the gap between the theoretical developments and massive data-driven studies.

To achieve this, we will combine thousands of publicly available metagenomes, newly generated metagenomes and metatranscriptomes, and cutting-edge bioinformatics algorithms in order to track species, subspecies and gene turnover at an unprecedented resolution and scale.

We will then use this data to test several hypotheses about the influence of intra-species diversity on the eco-biogeographical distribution of prokaryotic species, their response to perturbations, and the emergence of cooperative behaviour.

By unearthing the hidden dynamics that lie beyond the species level, INTRADIV will pave the way for a revolution in the way we study microbial ecosystems.