{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120259"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120259","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Carbon cycling and functional redundancy in closed microbial ecosystems","abstract":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms","abstract_html":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["de Jesus-Astacio, Luis Miguel"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Physics","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Kuehn, Seppe","O’Dwyer, James","Metcalf, William W","Cooper, Stephen L"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-05","date_published":"2023-05","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:57Z","subjects":["Microbial Ecology","Closed Microbial Ecosystem","Carbon Cycling","Functional Redundancy","Consumer-resource Model"],"languages":["en","eng"],"rights":["© Luis Miguel de Jesús Astacio, Urbana, 2023"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120259","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Kuehn, Seppe","O’Dwyer, James","Metcalf, William W","Cooper, Stephen L"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["de Jesus-Astacio, Luis Miguel"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2023-05","2023-04-23"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Physics"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Microbial Ecology","Closed Microbial Ecosystem","Carbon Cycling","Functional Redundancy","Consumer-resource Model"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en","eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["© Luis Miguel de Jesús Astacio, Urbana, 2023"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120259"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms","The student, Luis Miguel de Jesus-Astacio, accepted the attached license on 2023-04-12 at 15:01.","The student, Luis Miguel de Jesus-Astacio, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-04-12 at 15:16.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-04-23 at 10:35.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #18967 on 2023-09-01 at 17:08:19","Life on Earth depends on ecologically driven nutrient cycles to regenerate resources. Understanding how nutrient cycles emerge from a complex web of ecological processes is a central challenge in ecology. However, we lack model ecosystems that can be replicated, manipulated, and quantified in the laboratory, making it challenging to determine how changes in composition and the environment impact cycling. The goals of my work were to understand how carbon cycling arises in microbial communities and how community structure impacts the capacity to cycle carbon. Enabled by a new high-precision method to quantify carbon cycling, we show that materially closed microbial ecosystems (CES) provided with only light self-organized to robustly cycle carbon. Studying replicate CES that support carbon cycles revealed variable community composition but a conserved set of metabolic capabilities. We demonstrate that carbon cycling arises in functionally redundant communities in CES. We then focused on studying how community structure impacts the carbon cycling capacity of CES. To explore the functional landscape of carbon cycling CES within a reasonbale timeframe, we constructed a consumer-resource model of a CES. The model incorporates thermodynamics, autotroph and heterotroph consumers and necromass recycling. A library of CES were simulated and regression methods were employed to find a mapping between community composition and carbon cycling rates. Our model supports that functionally redundant communities are mainly composed of consumer generalists. Furthermore, we find that communities composed of generalists are more amenable to our regression approach than communities composed of specialists. We argue that this difference in predictive power might arise from disparities in the ruggedness of the functional landscapes of CES composed of generalist versus specialists. Our study helps establish CES as model biospheres for studying how ecosystems persistently cycle nutrients and provides one of the few concrete physical instances of functional redundancy in ecology."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Carbon cycling and functional redundancy in closed microbial ecosystems"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Kuehn, Seppe","O’Dwyer, James","Metcalf, William W","Cooper, Stephen L"],"dc:creator":["de Jesus-Astacio, Luis Miguel"],"dc:date":["2023-05","2023-04-23"],"dc:description":["Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms","The student, Luis Miguel de Jesus-Astacio, accepted the attached license on 2023-04-12 at 15:01.","The student, Luis Miguel de Jesus-Astacio, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-04-12 at 15:16.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-04-23 at 10:35.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #18967 on 2023-09-01 at 17:08:19","Life on Earth depends on ecologically driven nutrient cycles to regenerate resources. Understanding how nutrient cycles emerge from a complex web of ecological processes is a central challenge in ecology. However, we lack model ecosystems that can be replicated, manipulated, and quantified in the laboratory, making it challenging to determine how changes in composition and the environment impact cycling. The goals of my work were to understand how carbon cycling arises in microbial communities and how community structure impacts the capacity to cycle carbon. Enabled by a new high-precision method to quantify carbon cycling, we show that materially closed microbial ecosystems (CES) provided with only light self-organized to robustly cycle carbon. Studying replicate CES that support carbon cycles revealed variable community composition but a conserved set of metabolic capabilities. We demonstrate that carbon cycling arises in functionally redundant communities in CES. We then focused on studying how community structure impacts the carbon cycling capacity of CES. To explore the functional landscape of carbon cycling CES within a reasonbale timeframe, we constructed a consumer-resource model of a CES. The model incorporates thermodynamics, autotroph and heterotroph consumers and necromass recycling. A library of CES were simulated and regression methods were employed to find a mapping between community composition and carbon cycling rates. Our model supports that functionally redundant communities are mainly composed of consumer generalists. Furthermore, we find that communities composed of generalists are more amenable to our regression approach than communities composed of specialists. We argue that this difference in predictive power might arise from disparities in the ruggedness of the functional landscapes of CES composed of generalist versus specialists. Our study helps establish CES as model biospheres for studying how ecosystems persistently cycle nutrients and provides one of the few concrete physical instances of functional redundancy in ecology."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120259"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["© Luis Miguel de Jesús Astacio, Urbana, 2023"],"dc:subject":["Microbial Ecology","Closed Microbial Ecosystem","Carbon Cycling","Functional Redundancy","Consumer-resource Model"],"dc:title":["Carbon cycling and functional redundancy in closed microbial ecosystems"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Physics"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:57Z"}