sEEIngDOM: Ecological and Evolutionary Importance of Molecular Diversity in Dissolved Organic Matter

Ensuring water purity is crucial for protecting human health, sustaining ecosystems, and maintaining the balance of natural resources essential for life. The project, “sEEIngDOM”, aims to discover the importance of the tremendous diversity of molecules, termed chemodiversity, found in dissolved organic matter (DOM) for lake functioning and human wellbeing. It will do so by combining cutting-edge techniques in analytical chemistry, genomics, and statistical modelling with careful lab-based studies, proven field experiments, and large-scale observational surveys. By thinking about species of molecules as we would species of organisms, this project will draw upon rich theories and methods developed for the study of biodiversity.

The project seeks to understand how variation in chemodiversity across lakes is driven by associations with different microbes and how these microbes reciprocally adapt and evolve to different DOM. In the process, it will improve predictions of how important functions and services provided by lakes, such as drinking water, vary with chemodiversity. An exciting application of this work is to improve emerging technologies for water purification.