Jiaqi Tan
Louisiana State University, LA·Ecology & Evolution
As the climate warms, many plants and animals face stress they may not handle alone. The microbes living on and in them, known as their microbiome, can change how hosts respond to environmental change.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
synthetic microbiome
synthetic microbial consortia
host-microbe interactions
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test how elevated temperatures change microbe-microbe interactions and their effects on host fitness, using synthetic bacterial communities on duckweed, a small aquatic plant, in automated high-throughput experiments.
- Measure how functional redundancy, where different microbes perform the same role, shapes biodiversity and ecosystem functions under warming, using multifactorial tests of synthetic microbial communities.
- Assess how evolvable microbial communities are during microbiome breeding at higher temperatures, using duckweed and bacteria collected across a temperature gradient.
More about the research
This project asks whether scientists can assemble synthetic microbiomes, designed mixtures of chosen bacteria, that help a host cope with rising temperatures. Because microbial communities are so diverse, there are countless possible mixtures, and the rules that decide how a community affects its host are still unclear.
Why it matters
Engineered microbial communities may help plants and other hosts adapt to a warming climate. By showing which bacterial mixtures protect duckweed at higher temperatures and why, the work could guide the design of microbial consortia that make organisms and ecosystems more resilient to environmental change. The strain collections and high-throughput methods could be reused by other researchers building such communities.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Synthetic microbial consortia for organismal resilience and reproducible ecosystem services in changing environments
NSF · Jun 2025 – Jun 2027
Collaborative Research: Synthetic microbial consortia for organismal resilience and reproducible ecosystem services in changing environments
NSF · Jul 2023 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
Matthew Bowker
Northern Arizona University, AZ·Ecology & Evolution
Determine what controls the functional biodiversity of biological soil crusts at a global scale, through standardized surveys of biocrust composition run at many international sites.
Liana Burghardt
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Identify which legume host traits support which rhizobial bacteria by analyzing plant characteristics and field samples from legumes, using traditional and AI-enabled image and statistical analysis.
Kent Hatch
New College of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Test the relative importance of environmental filtering, host selection, spatial connectivity, microbial competition, cospeciation and host switching in shaping marine invertebrate microbiomes, using models from evolutionary and metacommunity ecology.
The school
Louisiana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $431M a year on research, 323 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.