2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference

March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH

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6/08/2017 | 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM | QUANTITATIVE STABLE ISOTOPE PROBING: WHAT IS IT, HOW DOES IT WORK, AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR FRESHWATER ECOLOGY? | 305B

QUANTITATIVE STABLE ISOTOPE PROBING: WHAT IS IT, HOW DOES IT WORK, AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR FRESHWATER ECOLOGY?

Understanding how the population dynamics of species contribute to ecosystem processes is a primary focus of ecological research, and has led to important breakthroughs in the ecology of macroscopic organisms. However, the inability to measure population-specific rates, such as growth, for microbial taxa within natural assemblages limits our understanding of how those taxa interact to regulate processes such as primary production, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. By combining techniques from microbiology, molecular biology, and bioinformatics, we have developed a new tool: quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP), for estimating taxon-specific growth and mortality within intact microbial assemblages. We use isotope substitution within DNA molecules to model taxon-specific population growth in the presence of ¹⁸O-labeled water. By applying this model to phylogenetic marker sequencing data collected from tracer incubations of environmental samples, we demonstrate how qSIP can be used to estimate rates of growth, mortality, and turnover for individual populations of prokaryotic taxa within intact microbial assemblages. We outline some of the opportunities for applying this approach to freshwater ecosystems to elucidate how microbial populations drive biogeochemical fluxes and food web dynamics.

C25 Food Webs
C11 Community Ecology
C04 Microbial Ecology

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Presenters/Authors

Benjamin Koch (), Northern Arizona University, ben.koch@nau.edu;