The 2018 Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute leads to a continued partnership with MAPS faculty and a collaborative research project for high school students and teachers across Kansas

 

Pam Lucas
Science Teacher
Skyline Schools

     Last summer, Pam Lucas attended the 2018 MAPS Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute. The summer institute is part of the Kansas NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006 Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas (MAPS) education and outreach initiatives and is under the direction of Dr. Peggy Schultz, Associate Specialist, Environmental Studies Program at the Kansas Biological Survey. During the 2018 MAPS Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute, teachers participated in whole group field activities and small group curriculum development exercises in the areas of aquatic, plant, soil and geographical information systems. The activities were designed to mirror the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Science and Engineering Practices.
     Pam’s curricular interest during the institute focused on developing activities related to the MAPS terrestrial (plant) systems research; however, she could easily see how many of the institute's activities could be taught to all her science classes. One of the first whole group activities was called Asking Good Questions. This exercise was led by Dr. Helen Alexander, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and part of the MAPS Plant Systems research team at the University of Kansas (KU). Pam saw this exercise as a student-centered approach to doing science, a key factor in designing project based lessons, so she incorporated it into her lesson plans. She started all of her science classes this year with this activity. Pam said she decided to teach the Asking Good Questions exercise, because it was a good way to teach her students how “to ask good questions and to realize the importance of doing so in science. Plus, this activity encourages a skill that applies to all of the NGSS standards and practices....” In addition, she said “I used the Pepper Population Simulation activity that Michael Ralph, Master Teacher from the KU UKan Teach program, shared with us to help my students model logistic and exponential population growth and to understand the differences between them;" As for the other activities presented, she said "I'm using the majority of what I have learned from the summer institute in my advanced class.”
    One of the projects that the teachers developed at the workshop involved collaborating with fellow participants from across the state. Pam explained their project as follows: I am working “with a group of teachers to design a cooperative project for our students to do utilizing little blue stem seeds collected from each of our home areas, plus, some from Indiana, Missouri, and Minnesota. We will be looking for variation of growth in little blue stem plants that have been inoculated with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). We suspect that the seed from south central Kansas will do better than that from the other states. At this point, my students helped collect blue stem seeds and those seeds were then planted and stored on campus, at KU. Later in the spring, some of the MAPS Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute terrestrial faculty will deliver the plants to us and help us plant them. We will take some initial measurements on a group of plants that we will plant in a plot at our school. There also will be some blue stems that we don't plant. With the plants we do not plant, we will do a small study to see how well AMF vs non-AMF inoculated plants grow by comparing plant size and root size.” With this lesson, she hopes to show students “the benefit of evolving symbiotic relationships, showing that natural selection leads to adaptation, and also show that those organisms with a heritable, advantageous trait will increase in proportion.” Pam admitted she is still developing some objectives for this lesson as well as for future lessons related to this experiment. She knows that all of the lessons she develops from this project "will fit nicely with the NGSS HS-LS4 standards dealing with evolution." This project will also incorporate teaching students many of the skills outlined in the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices such as collecting and analyzing data. Pam plans to use this collaborative lesson to serve as a foundation for several other project based learning lessons she plans to develop.

Pam with some of her students

     When asked what was the impact on students who experienced the MAPS Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute lessons, she said “Overall, I think that the lessons I have used so far have been beneficial to my students. They have learned the concepts and are better at applying them, which will help them do well on assessments.” And she was quick to add, “The kids that have participated in these lessons, so far, have done well connecting what they have learned to past lessons. I think that once our little blue stem study gets underway, I will see more of these connections being made. I'm excited to see this happen!”
     As for her thoughts about what she has gained from her participation in the MAPS Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute, she said “attending the Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute has really helped me get a start at becoming more project based in my classes. My school is one that is currently in the re-design process and doing more project based learning is part of that re-design. I feel that the summer institute has given me a good foundation to build on for this new approach.” Over this academic school year, Pam has maintained contact Drs. Helen Alexander, Peggy Schultz, and Jim Bever, Distinguished Foundation Professor in EEB at KU, Senior Scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey, and Co-PI for the MAPS project, “because we have had to plan quite a bit for our blue stem project. We actually had a zoom meeting with them and the other three teachers to discuss how and when to get our project underway this spring.  I'm looking forward to them coming to work with my students and I this spring. They have been great to work with!” Just last week, the MAPS research team traveled to Medicine Lodge, Pratt, Goddard, and Hutchinson KS to help each teacher and their students get this collaborative project started.
  Pam Lucas teaches at Skyline Schools in Pratt, KS. Skyline Schools is a PreK-12 school all in one building, and Pam is the high school science teacher. Approximately 100 students attend the high school section of the school. This is Pam's third year teaching at Skyline Schools.

Other teachers who participated in the 2018 Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute and who are also involved in the collaborative blue stem project are Jake Bjostad, Medicine Lodge HS; Marylee Ramsay, Goddard HS; and T.J. Williams, Hutchinson HS.

Workforce Development, Education and Outreach funding for the HERS program is provided by the Kansas NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006 titled: Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas. The award's workforce development and educational objectives are designed to enhance STEM education in Kansas by supporting activities that will lead to an expanded STEM workforce or prepare a new generation for STEM careers in the areas of aquatic, plant and soil microbiome environments and ecological systems.

Kansas NSF EPSCoR Announces First Awards for the Spring of 2019

     Kansas NSF EPSCoR helps Kansas build its research capacity and competitiveness in science and technology through the First Award program initiated through the current Kansas NSF
EPSCoR RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006 titled: Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas (MAPS).  MAPS First Awards are intended to help early career faculty become competitive for funding from the research directorates at the National Science Foundation. The awards do this by encouraging early career faculty to submit proposals to the NSF or other federal funding agency as soon as possible after their first faculty appointment, and by accelerating the pace of their research as well as the quality of their subsequent proposals. First Awards are awarded to a single-investigators to support their research program at their institution. Any tenure track faculty member who: 1) is currently nontenured at the assistant professor rank at the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, Wichita State University, Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Pittsburg State University or Washburn University; 2) is within the first three years of his/her faculty appointment; 3) has not previously received a First Award or similar funding from another EPSCoR or EPSCoR-like (Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence, COBRE) program in Kansas; and 4) is not currently nor has previously been a lead Principal Investigator of a research grant funded by a federal agency. Individual investigators may submit a total project budget of up to $100,000 in direct costs to the MAPS First Award program.  Only projects with research in areas that are related to the current Kansas NSF EPSCoR focus of microbiomes as broadly construed to be in aquatic, plant and/or soil systems were considered.  The following individuals and their research projects were awarded MAPS First Awards in the Spring of 2019:

Preetham Burugupally
Mechanical Engineering
Wichita State University

Trapping and assistedpairing (TAP) microfluidic chip meant to study plant cell-microbe interactions in a microenvironment at the single-cell level

     The research goal of this project is to design and validate a scaled-down version of the Trapping and Assisted Pairing (TAP) chip, a microuidics
tool for conducting plant cell-microbe interaction studies at the single-cell level meant to advance microbiome research. This goal stems from the big picture idea of smart and sustainable agricultural practices to meet
the future global crop production demands in the era of ecosystem degradation and climate change. The TAP will be capable of screening up to 10,000 cell-microbe pairs for symbiotic/parasitic relationships, help plant biologists devise approaches to maximize the symbiotic functions/minimize the parasitic functions, and engineer stress-tolerant plants. The TAP leverages droplet microuidics to efficiently trap 10,000 pairs of droplets |one set of droplets containing individual plant cells and another set of droplets containing individual microbes |and merge the droplet pairs, initiating 10,000 cell-microbe interactions. For maximizing the cell-microbe pairs, it is critical to understand the droplet trapping and merging physics. The project objective is to describe droplet trapping and merging physics in
the traps, and demonstrate the droplet trapping and merging capabilities of TAP. This project will significantly advance knowledge on two fronts. Biology: Advance the understanding of microbiomes. The TAP chip is a cell handling tool designed to advance microbiome research by enabling plant cell-microbe interaction studies at the single-cell level. By integrating a computer controlled x-y stage, automated data acquisition system, real-time image processing, and traditional imaging infrastructure, the TAP will be a live-cell reporter system that can track the progression in cell-microbe interactions for extended periods of time, and thus allow it to answer a wealth of microbiome questions: What genes in cells/microbes turn ON/OFF during interactions? Are there any yet-to-be-discovered cell microbe relationships? Engineering: A fundamental understanding of the influence of trap geometry and fluid properties on droplet trapping and merging. The TAP leverages droplet microuidics to pair individual plant cells and microbes in a droplet. It is very critical to understand droplet trapping and merging physics for maximizing the plant cell-microbe pairs. Through first principles-based parametric studies, design charts and guidelines necessary for the design of traps will be created.

Andres Patrignani
Agronomy
Kansas State University

Upscaling transient microbial activity and soil moisture dynamics

     Soil water and heat dynamics exert a strong control on soil respiration by modulating the rate of microbial activity, substrate availability, and the diffusion rate of carbon dioxide at the soil aggregate level. Thus, a first order up-scaling of soil respiration from the aggregate level to the
watershed level inevitably requires knowledge of the spatial structure of-, and cross-scale interactions between, soil moisture, soil temperature, and soil respiration. The goal of this study is to accurately quantify watershed scale soil respiration applying a simple up-scaling strategy based on the merger of chamber-based soil CO2 efflux observations with modeling predictions. We hypothesize that combining detailed information about the soil spatial variability of the catchment area with accurate soil respiration observations and a parsimonious model will result in more accurate estimates of soil respiration than the use of chamber observations or model predictions alone. A distinct feature of the proposed method is the integration of time-invariant landscape patterns with the soil moisture information from a cosmic-ray neutron detector capable of large-scale non-invasive soil moisture observations. This project will bridge the gap point-level (i.e. small survey chambers) measurements that leave large unmonitored areas between observations ecosystem-level soil respiration products such as those generated by eddy covariance flux towers. The proposed method will provide a framework for integrating ubiquitous soil respiration measurements and existing models of soil respiration to reconcile soil and tower fluxes and to better measure the exchanges of carbon dioxide of terrestrial ecosystems. Up-scaling methods that account for watershed soil spatial heterogeneity are essential to account for potential soil respiration “hot spots” and “hot moments”, better evaluate factors controlling the spatial variability of soil respiration, and assess the representativeness of eddy covariance tower measurements. This is particularly relevant in a global scenario characterized by the widespread deployment of micrometeorological tower sites that use eddy covariance methods (e.g. FLUXNET), the growing market of automated chamber systems, and new hectometer-level, non-invasive soil moisture sensing technologies.

Tom Platt
Biology
Kansas State University

Prevalence and co-occurrence of pathogenic and cheater agrobacteria on healthy and crown gall disease infected sunflowers

     Cheaters threaten the evolutionary persistence of cooperative traits. When cheaters and cooperative individuals co-occur, cheaters have an advantage because they benefit from the costly action of their competitors while themselves avoiding cooperative costs. The investigators will examine the prevalence and degree of co-occurrence of a cooperative pathogen and the avirulent cheaters that exploit it. The generalist pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens infects plant hosts at great cost to itself. Infected plants produce a public good resource that the pathogen and any present cheaters can catabolize. Our work has experimentally demonstrated that the cooperative pathogen is vulnerable to invasion by avirulent, cheating genotypes of agrobacteria that out compete the pathogen in disease environments. However, the degree to which there is opportunity for this to occur in nature is poorly understood. Accordingly, we propose to assess how common cheating genotypes are and the degree to which cooperative and cheater agrobacteria co-occur in natural environments. We will sample agrobacteria from Konza Prairie from the rhizosphere of Helianthus annuus plants. Characterization of the pathogenesis functions, opine catabolism functions, and phylogenetic relationships of this sample of natural agrobacteria strains as well as those from an experimental mesocosm will allow us to determine the degree and distribution of agrobacterial genetic diversity and evaluate the prevalence and diversity of cheater strains. The investigators will also measure the rate and spatial scale of cooperator and cheater dispersal in experimental mesocosms to access how dispersal influences cooperative benefits and the spread of cooperative pathogens and cheaters. The proposed research will provide insight into the ecological dynamics mediating the evolution of cooperation. This proposal bridges concepts and approaches from ecology, evolutionary biology, and genomics to examine how competition and dispersal influence the dynamics of microbial populations. The findings are also relevant to understanding how microbial dynamics influence the spread of a facultative pathogen in both environmental reservoir and infected host environments. These issues are of key importance to understanding the epidemiology of pathogens that can live independent of their hosts. The plant pathogen A. tumefaciens has been a productive study system for determining the mechanisms of microbial interactions but the ecological consequences of these mechanisms are poorly characterized. The investigators have previously leveraged this mechanistic information to identify factors shaping key ecological and evolutionary processes like the fitness costs and benefits of cooperative pathogenesis.

Maggie Wagner
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Kansas

A simplified community to enable manipulative study of maize microbiome function

     Plants live in close association with hundreds to thousands of bacterial and fungal species, both on and inside their roots. This diverse and complex microbial community—the plant microbiome—can profoundly affect the health of the host plant. For this reason, plant microbiomes have great promise as a sustainable tool for protecting both crops and wild plants against environmental challenges. However, the enormous complexity of natural microbiomes has been an obstacle to understanding the principles and mechanisms that determine their composition and function. One powerful approach to overcoming this challenge is experimentation with “synthetic communities” (SynComs), which typically consist of dozens to a few hundred known microbial strains, contained within an otherwise sterile environment. SynComs enable precise manipulation of microbiome composition and analysis of the effects on community function. The goal of this project is to create a SynCom specifically for maize and use it to explore the role of microbe-microbe interactions in root microbiome function under drought conditions. Maize is critically important both as a crop plant and a model system in genetics research. However, the existing maize SynCom contains only seven bacterial species, which limits its value and versatility. The proposed experiments will investigate maize root microbiome assembly from farm and prairie soils across a natural precipitation gradient in Kansas (Objective 1), generate a curated collection of microbes isolated from maize roots growing in these soils (Objective 2), and use the resulting SynCom to test how key organisms influence the rest of the microbiome and function of the whole community, in a water-limited environment (Objective 3). The proposed work would be the most thorough study to date of the maize root microbiome response to drought conditions, as well as the first to investigate the role of legacy effects (land-use and historical precipitation levels) on soil microbiome function. It would also increase the number of microbial strains available for maize SynCom experiments by approximately 30-fold, thus massively improving the microbial functional diversity that can be studied. The effects of SynCom strains on maize phenotype and microbiome structure under water-stressed conditions will be directly tested under reproducible germ-free growth conditions. The expanded SynCom may form the basis of a wide variety of follow-up projects, investigating plant-microbiome interactions at levels ranging from genes to ecosystems.

Funding for the Spring 2019 MAPS First Awards is provided by the Kansas NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006 titled: Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas. The grant's workforce development and educational objectives are designed to enhance STEM education in Kansas by supporting activities that will lead to an expanded STEM workforce or prepare a new generation for STEM careers in the areas of aquatic, plant and soil microbiome environments and ecological systems.

MAPS researchers discuss accomplishments at the 2019 MAPS Symposium

Dr. Kristin Bowman-James,
KU Distinguished Professor of Chemistry
 and Kansas EPSCoR Director
giving the MAPS project research overview

    On March 18, 2019 high school students and teachers; undergraduate and graduate students; faculty, and institutional and state leaders participated in the Kansas NSF
EPSCoR RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006 titled: Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas (MAPS) statewide 2019 MAPS Symposium. There were over eighty participants in attendance. Opening remarks were given by Dr. Peter Dorhout, Vice President for Research and Professor of Chemistry at Kansas State University (KSU), followed by a keynote address by Dr. M. Ed Galindo, faculty member at the University of Idaho, Associate Director for Education and Diversity for the NASA Idaho Space Grant Consortium, and member of the MAPS Science and Education Advisory Council (SEAC).  Dr. Kristin Bowman-James, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kansas (KU) and Director Kansas NSF EPSCoR provided an overview of the project and Dr. Eric Welch, Professor of Public Affairs and Directors of the C-STEPS at Arizona State University provided a brief summary evaluating the program so far. To complete the morning session, each of the four research areas: Aquatic, Plant and Soils Systems as well as the Research Synthesis group, co-principal investigators or research team leaders discussed the accomplishments, challenges and future plans of the project.

2019 MAPS Symposium Participants

     Over lunch, Dr. Teresa MacDonald, Associate Director of Public Programs for the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum at KU, introduced her and Dr. Ben Sikes', Assistant Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Assistant Scientist, Kansas Biological Survey (KBS) at KU, "Microbes on the Move" traveling museum project that began its tour on March 15, 2019 in Chanute, Kansas. The afternoon session consisted of updates from the Maps Education, Outreach and Diversity initiatives. Dr. Peggy Schultz provided information related to the Ecology for Elementary Students program and the Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute .  Dr Cody Marshall, faculty at Haskell Indian Nations University and Dr. Jay Johnson, Professor and Associate Chair of Geography & Atmospheric Science and Director of C-FIRST, gave a brief history of Haskell Indian Nations University and an overview of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Program (HERS). Jill Haukos, Director of Education presented the Konza Environmental Education Program (KEEP) and Dr. Brenee King provided an overview of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Program (LSAMP). For the remainder of the afternoon, twenty-three MAPS individual research projects were presented at the MAPS Poster Session. 

MAPS Poster Session

The following is a list of the MAPS poster project titles and authors who presented:

• "Linking the presence and function of denitrification genes to whole river estimates of denitrification in response to a large-scale nitrogen enrichment of the Kansas River (USA)" Amy Burgin
• "Fire severity effects on ectomycorrhizal colonization of Pinus palustris and Pinus taeda"  Hannah I Dea, Jacob R. Hopkins, Ben A Sikes 
• "Analysis of the Plant-Soil Microbiome Surrounding Native and Non-Native Grasses Across a Precipitation Gradient in Kansas"Mitch Greer and Scout Harrison
• "Head Above Water: Sea Level Rise and Gentrification in Brooklyn and Queens, NY." Trevor Guinn
• "HABs Rehab: Toward Predicting & Preventing Harmful Algal Blooms in Cheney Reservoir" Carlos Cross, Amy Hammett, Daniel Hammett, Jacob Hanna, Issac Stanton
• "Do novel inputs into the Kansas River affect the water or sediment microbiome and water chemistry?" Janaye Hanschu, Lydia Zeglin, Amy Burgin, Michelle Kelly, Emma Overstreet, Cay Thompson
• "Ecotypic Adaptation of Ascomycetes to Drought" Kyle J. Ismert, Dr. Andrea Porras-Alfaro , Dr. Jennifer Rudgers, Dr. Ari Jumpponen 
• "Smart Adaptation of Enriched Microbiomes in Recovered Nutrient Products (biofertilizers) from anaerobic wastewater treatment to the native soil" Arvind Damodara Kannan, Dr. Prathap Parameswaran
• "Migration Medicine: How Shifting Woodlands Affect Navajo Health" Sasha Keams
• "Phosphate and pH data from Fort Hays, Konza, and Eastern Kansas EPSCoR research sites." Stephan Koenigsberger, Mathew Kirk, Dylan Beaudette
• "Probabilistic Modeling of E. Coli SOS Response System Using High-throughput Biological Data" Stephen Kotiang, Ali Eslami
• "3D Freeze Printing of Aerogels" Halil Tetik, Dr. Dong Lin
• "Minirhizotrons: Existing Technologies & Motivation for Developing an Automated Minirhizotron Camera System" Colby J. Moorberg, Yuqi Song, José Guilherme Cesário Pereira Pinto
• 'Impact of Land Use on Soil and Groundwater Microbial Communities in Great Bend Prairie Aquifer" Christina Richardson, Allie Richard, Janaye Hanschu, Lydia Zeglin, Matthew Kirk
• "Terrestrial-aquatic connections, and what they tell us about drivers of microbial, isotopic, and metabolic activity across a Kansas aridity gradient." Anne Schechner, Bre Waterman, Matt Kirk,  Walter Dodds
• "The Effects of Climate and Land Use on Methanotrophic Communities" Carrie Spanton, Terry Loeke
• "FGC: Fragmentary gene caller for gene prediction in metagenomic sequencing data" Sirisha Thippabhotla, Ben Liu, Cuncong Zhong
• "Fire Sovereignty: Using Prescribed Burns to Conserve Tallgrass Prairies on Tribal Lands" Kynzer Wanithunga
• "Methane oxidation in native prairie soil" Irosha Wanithunga, Charles W. Rice 
• "3D printing of Biocompatible Materials (Hydroxyapatite& NanoCellulose Hydrogel)" Guang Yang, Dong Lin
• "Soil Microbial Community Composition Across a Precipitation Gradient with Different Land Uses" Carlos A. B. Pires, Marcos V. M. Sarto (KSU), and Charles W. Rice (KSU)
• "GRARNA: Guided Reference Assembly of ncRNA for Metagenomic Sequencing Data" Ben Liu, Sirisha Thippabhotla, Cuncong Zhong

Funding for the 2019 MAPS Symposium is provided by the Kansas NSF EPSCoR RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006 titled: Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas. The grant's workforce development and educational objectives are designed to enhance STEM education in Kansas by supporting activities that will lead to an expanded STEM workforce or prepare a new generation for STEM careers in the areas of aquatic, plant and soil microbiome environments and ecological systems.