Sara BEIER

KEYWORDS: microbial ecology, disturbance ecology, resistance - resilience, life history, species interactions, diversity, metabarcoding – metagenomics – metatranscriptomics, genomic traits

RESEARCH INTERESTS: I am aquatic microbial ecologist with particular interest in using meta-omic sequence data to better understand and predict the functional and compositional dynamics of microbial communities in response to disturbances and environmental change.

Global change due to human activities causes an increasing number of disturbances in aquatic ecosystems, e.g. due to salinization or expanding oxygen depletion zones. This poses a challenge to humanity because human life on earth depends on the stability of ecosystem services.

Earlier research points to several mechanisms that support the stability of communities in fluctuating environments: first, there has been a long debate about the link of diversity structures and the vulnerability of these communities to environmental change. Secondly, the tolerance of individual community members against environmental change impacts also the community-level robustness and a classification of individual community members reflecting their resistance and resilience to environmental change may be a valuable tool to evaluate the vulnerability of whole communities in a disturbed environment. Third, also species interactions may drive community stability. For instance, can positive interactions weaken stability, if the reduction of one species’ fitness causes others to decline.

I am particularly interested to assess whether, to what extend and under which conditions are community dynamics in fluctuating environments driven either by species diversity, individual species characteristics or community network architecture?

For this purpose, I am evaluating genetic signatures from microbial meta-omic data that can inform about community diversity, the life history of community members and their interactions among each other from experimental studies or field work.

While my focus during my past research was solely on prokaryotic communities, I will in future extend this focus to consider also interactions of prokaryotes with viruses or microbial eukaryotes to address their impact on microbial community dynamics.
 

Figure 1: Sampling coastal lagoons and fjords

Figure 2: Set up of continuous cultures (Rain-Franco et al. 2024)

Selected publications

• Rain-Franco A, Peter H, de Moraes GP, Beier S. 2024. The cost of adaptability: resource availability constrains functional stability under pulsed disturbances. mSphere 9:e00727-23.
• Beier S, Werner J, Bouvier T, Mouquet N, Violle C. 2022. Trait-trait relationships and tradeoffs vary with genome size in prokaryotes. Front Microbiol 13.
• Rain-Franco A, Mouquet N, Gougat-Barbera C, Bouvier T, Beier S. 2022. Niche breadth affects bacterial transcription patterns along a salinity gradient. Mol Ecol 31:1216–1233.
• Shen D, Jürgens K, Beier S. 2018. Experimental insights into the importance of ecologically dissimilar bacteria to community assembly along a salinity gradient. Environ Microbiol 20:1170–1184.
• Beier S, Shen D, Schott T, Jürgens K. 2017. Metatranscriptomic data reveal the effect of different community properties on multifunctional redundancy. Mol Ecol 26:6813–6826.

Please see ORCID (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3707-4487 ) or google scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PAmmfTcAAAAJ&hl=de) for a full publication list