Biodiversity is the source of many important foods, medicines, and other products essential to human well-being. Yet, a great deal of biodiversity remains hidden from view. We only have a superficial understanding of how biodiversity originates, persists, and responds to a changing environment. Many species are interconnected, which makes biodiversity complex to understand. This research studies this interconnectedness, especially the interactions between individual organisms. This research focuses on a group of tropical ants and the fungus that they cultivate in their nests. This includes 245 species of ants, their cultivated fungi, and other microbial organisms. The goal is to uncover the hidden diversity of organisms within the ant-fungus relationship. Discoveries from this research will reveal new diversity, especially diversity arising from hidden interactions. These discoveries will also potentially be developed into new technologies and medicines that benefit human society. This project will train a new generation of biodiversity scientists as students. The project will enhance international scientific collaboration with Brazil to tackle global challenges. Finally, the general public will be engaged through innovative communications making use of natural history museums.
The project will sample leafcutter ants and nests widely across Brazil, Costa Rica, and Panama. These samples will focus on groups of organisms where hidden diversity is expected. This includes the cultivated fungi, parasites that attack these fungi, and bacteria that function in garden defense. Both phylogenetic and taxonomic diversity will be assessed for all these samples. Then a coupled comprehensive gene expression and natural product profiling approach will be applied. This will allow the characterization of genetic diversity as well as the functions of the ants' garden microbiomes. Finally, the project will use cutting-edge techniques in natural products research. The functional aspect involves characterizing and understanding the chemical compounds used to signal, harm, help, and interact with the various interacting organisms. This project benefits from the wide-ranging expertise of the US-Brazil investigative team, whose research spans insect and fungal taxonomy, phylogenetics, genomics, and natural products chemistry.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
