The role of the microbiome in insect community responses to climate change
Symbioses with microorganisms may serve as an important mechanism of rapid insect response and adaptation to changing environmental conditions. As the climate-ecological crisis progresses, increasingly affecting natural populations and communities of insects, their dynamic relationships with microorganisms may be of particular importance. However, while rapid advances in DNA sequencing and bioinformatic techniques have allowed us to unravel many aspects of symbiosis biology, our understanding of the diversity and importance of symbiotic relationships in natural communities is fragmentary.
We aim to comprehensively describe the variability of insect communities and their symbiotic microorganisms in one of the most rapidly changing regions of the world from the climate perspective - the High Arctic. We conduct collaborative fieldwork in various areas of Greenland and apply innovative sequencing-based techniques to the characterization of both historical and freshly obtained collections of insects representing much of the local diversity, targeting both insects and their associated microbes. These data will allow us to describe changes in the composition of insect communities in various habitat types in East Greenland. For each of the insects, we will obtain information on the abundance and identity of its associated microorganisms, describing the variability within species and the transmission of microbial strains across species. Comparative analyses of the genomes of selected microbial strains and mathematical modeling of interspecific interaction data will allow us to understand the symbionts’ effects on the host biology and their responses to changing environmental conditions. Finally, we are planning to conduct a series of field experiments to assess the selected effects of symbionts on host biology.
The project is one of the first attempts to systematically describe the distribution, diversity, transmission, and importance of symbiotic microorganisms at the level of not only single species but entire multi-species communities. It will enable the detailed description and understanding of processes that are likely to be of key importance in natural communities, especially as they face environmental and climate changes. The planned comparisons will make it possible to relate the results for species-poor Greenland ecosystems to those from more diverse temperate and tropical zones, including Poland, helping researchers accurately describe changes that occur within ecosystems during the climate-ecological crisis.
Zackenberg Valley in North-East Greenland - our primary insect sampling site
This research direction is funded by NCN Opus 22 project “Micro-allies during mega-crisis? The role of the microbiome in insect community responses to climate change” no. 2021/43/B/NZ8/03376. It has also benefitted from funding from International Network for Terrestrial Research and Monitoring in the Arctic (INTERACT) Transnational Access awards to Piotr Łukasik (2021) and Michał Kolasa (2022).