SIESTA
Dramatic shifts in Earth’s climate and geography have profoundly influenced biological innovation and biogeochemical cycles. Despite widespread and extreme environmental change including global glaciations lasting millions of years, microbial life has thrived: accruing distinct phylogenies, morphologies, physiologies, and functions over geological time.
Microorganisms use dormancy as a survival strategy to persist throughout unfavorable changes in their environment. Dormant organisms withdraw from the present environment and become part of a seed-bank, investing instead in contributing to the diversity and function of future ecosystems.
This leads to the rousing proposition that a shift in the active/dormant fraction of a microbial population may profoundly affect ecological functioning and elemental cycling. Despite this intriguing connection, we lack fundamental knowledge on the prevalence, triggers and timescales of dormancy, and how these factors affect ecosystems and elemental budgets.
The ERC-funded SIESTA aims to address this by elucidating the role of microbial dormancy as an ecological and biogeochemical regulator on Earth. SIESTA aims to:
SIESTA is an ERC Starting Grant Project funded by the European Union (Grant agreement No. 101115755).
Microorganisms use dormancy as a survival strategy to persist throughout unfavorable changes in their environment. Dormant organisms withdraw from the present environment and become part of a seed-bank, investing instead in contributing to the diversity and function of future ecosystems.
This leads to the rousing proposition that a shift in the active/dormant fraction of a microbial population may profoundly affect ecological functioning and elemental cycling. Despite this intriguing connection, we lack fundamental knowledge on the prevalence, triggers and timescales of dormancy, and how these factors affect ecosystems and elemental budgets.
The ERC-funded SIESTA aims to address this by elucidating the role of microbial dormancy as an ecological and biogeochemical regulator on Earth. SIESTA aims to:
- Quantify the prevalence of dormancy among taxonomically and functionally diverse microbial communities.
- Identify the triggers and timescales of dormancy.
- Link dormancy to the emergence, survival and evolution of microbial populations.
- Elucidate the role of dormancy as a regulator of biogeochemical cycles.
SIESTA is an ERC Starting Grant Project funded by the European Union (Grant agreement No. 101115755).
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. |