Mark your calendar for the next NEBS Meeting on Saturday, March 4, 2023 at 7pm ET at Harvard University’s Haller Lecture Hall and via Zoom. Non-members may register for the meeting access link here.

The traditional framework for explaining how a plant’s traits can influence its fitness is that the trait is based solely on its own genome. However, microbes inhabit all internal and external spaces of a plant both above and below ground and can impact the expression of these traits. In mutualisms, this microbially mediated selection can result in conflicts between host plant and microbe over the optimal trait value. Gaining a better understanding of the strength of selection exerted by microbes can lead to fundamental changes in how we approach microbiome research and may be key to moving towards more sustainable agriculture.

The speaker, Dr. Chandra Jack, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Clark University in Worcester. Dr. Jack received her undergraduate, Masters, and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Rice University. She is an evolutionary biologist interested in studying the eco-evolutionary dynamics of biotic interactions (microbe-microbe, plant-microbe, plant-insect, and all combinations). The ubiquitous nature of microbes and their association with all living organisms makes them an ideal system for studying how coevolution between species has led to long-term cooperative associations and how intra-and interspecific microbial conflict can determine the population structure of the plant microbiome. My current and future research seek to understand how microbes influence plant fitness, functional traits, and population structure; how genetic variation is maintained through species interactions; and the consequences of these interactions under different environmental conditions.