NachiketShankar

I am a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Boston. I am originally from Bangalore, India and my interest in how bacteria interact with hosts stems from my work on DNA evolution and codon usage in bacteria in the National Center for Biological sciences in India. I was interested in understanding how groups of diverse microbes interact with each other to form communities and, in turn how different microbial communities interact with hosts.

I started my graduate school in 2014 at University of Massachusetts Boston, to study how microbial communities in the soil interact with plant hosts. During the course of my studies, I read a couple of really neat papers by William Swenson (2000) and another by Kevin Panke-Buisse (2015) showing that an ecosystem can be selected and evolved over time to influence a host trait. I was very keen to understand further, in the context of the soil ecosystem, how plant biomass is can be influenced.

It was a very cool idea, in theory, a soil ecosystem (which also contains microbes) could be evolved over time, by applying a selection pressure of plants that have high biomass or low biomass.

I conducted this study over the past two years, and showed that starting from the same microbial community and genetically identical plants, two distinct microbial communities can be evolved to influence plant growth, one microbial community that results in plants with high biomass and another that results in plants with lower biomass.

All the above work has been carried out in <$4000. However, at this stage in my study, in order to understand the mechanisms by which microbes in the soil are influencing the plant, I would have to conduct an expensive experiment by sequencing how the expression of different genes in the plant are changing as a response to the microbes in the soil.

October 2019