In nature, organisms live in communities and form complex trophic interactions. Understanding how multitrophic communities evolve and respond to environmental changes is a fundamental and pressing challenge in face of global change. While research in evolutionary biology revealed that a warming climate can drive adaptive evolution of individual organisms in the community, studies from community ecology showed that a warming climate can alter trophic interactions and community structure, which in turn changes the (co)evolutionary trajectory of interacting species. Thus, integrating evolutionary and ecological responses is crucial to understand the climate responses of individual species and communities. However, methodological challenges have hampered empirical studies until now. EvolCommunity will address these challenges by experimentally evolving populations of three interacting species (aphid, duckweed, and daphnia) in their native communities using outdoor mesocosms with different climate conditions. We will quantify how warming shapes the function and evolution of the multitrophic community in real-time. By manipulating climate-driven plant evolution, we will determine whether plant evolution alters the community’s response to climate change. We will also assess whether the interacting species coevolve in the community by quantifying the reciprocal selection imposed from their evolutionary changes. We will investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying (co)evolution using state-of-the-art genetic tools. Using a combination of experimental evolution, community manipulation, and cutting-edge genetic and analytic tools, EvolCommunity will push the research boundaries of evolutionary ecology by revealing the mechanisms and processes of community evolution at work. The outcomes will open new research avenues in evolutionary ecology by establishing a new methodological framework that integrates evolutionary biology and community ecology in natural communities.

Diet is a key factor driving vertebrate evolution. Exploring dietary traits and trophic relationships in fossil food webs is fundamental for understanding radiation and extinction events. This project aims to constrain the evolution of herbivory (plant feeding) and trophic interaction of extinct vertebrates at different spatiotemporal scales by analysing their teeth with isotopic and dental wear techniques. A new approach of combined Ca and stable Sr isotope as well as 3D surface texture (3DST) analysis will be developed and applied to fossil teeth of mammal-ancestors and dinosaurs. Teeth record time-series of diet-related isotope compositions in their enamel while their surface tracks short-term food abrasion. These diet proxies will be calibrated on extant vertebrates with well-known diets from wild animals and controlled feeding experiments simulating diet and trophic level switches. Both Ca isotopes and enamel surface textures have a high preservation potential in fossil teeth and enable micro sampling of enamel for Ca isotope and non-destructive 3DST analysis. For the first time, I will combine Ca isotope and 3DST analysis to reconstruct the diet of extinct key vertebrate taxa and their trophic level in fossil food webs. This multi-proxy approach will provide a versatile toolset to test independently feeding hypotheses that mostly hinge on tooth and skeletal morphology, leading to fundamental new insights into the palaeoecology, dietary flexibility and niche partitioning of fossil vertebrates. The aim is to reconstruct the evolution of herbivory in vertebrates. Here, major objectives are: 1) to infer ontogenetic and evolutionary diet changes by combined Ca isotope and 3DST analysis of fossil teeth, 2) explore stable and radiogenic Sr isotopes as combined proxies for trophic level and habitat use, and 3) pioneer 3DST analysis for reptiles. Beyond the field of palaeontology these dietary proxies will be broadly applicable in archaeology, anthropology and ecology.

Axions and other very light axion-like particles (ALPs) appear in many extensions of the Standard Model and are well motivated theoretically: ALPs can solve the well-known strong CP problem, act as a dark matter candidate and could also explain the famous muon (g-2) discrepancy. The experimental effort to search for ALPs as dark matter candidates is ongoing and has been considerably intensified in recent years, leading to the proposal and construction of a wide range of dedicated experiments. However, none of these dedicated experiments is sensitive to those ALPs that can explain low-energy anomalies such as (g-2). I propose therefore to pioneer an alternative search strategy for axion-like particles via their decay into two photons, using data collected at the Large Hadron Collider. This approach requires fundamental innovations on the photon identification capabilities of the current detectors as well as radically new analysis strategies. Within the LightAtLHC project, I will study proton-proton and lead-lead collisions, collected during LHC Run-3, and search for Higgs Boson decays in two ALPs as well as the direct production of ALPs via photon fusion and their subsequent decay into two low-energy photons. To achieve the required sensitivity, I will develop highly specialized photon reconstruction algorithms for the ATLAS detector. These efforts will largely cover the relevant parameter space, leaving out only a small region. To also close this gap, I will extend the upcoming FASER experiment at the LHC by an innovative presampler detector, which allows for an unambiguous ALPs detection. By the end of the LightAtLHC project, I can either rule out the most promising ALP models in a mass range from 10 MeV to 1 TeV, or discover a new elementary particle.

The main and most important feature of vaccines is the induction of an immunological memory response, which is key to providing long-term protection against pathogens. The current strategies for potent antibacterial and antiviral vaccines employ conjugation of pathogen specific entities onto carrier proteins, and are limited to formulations that suffer from low stability and short shelf-lives, and are thus not viable in developing countries. Strategies for the development of new vaccinations against endogenous diseases like cancer further remain an unmet challenge, since current methodologies suffer from a lack of a modular and tailored vaccine-specific functionalisation. I therefore propose a radically new design approach in the development of fully synthetic molecular vaccines. My team will synthesise carbohydrate and glycopeptide appended epitopes that are grafted onto supramolecular building blocks. These units can be individually designed to attach disease specific antigens and immunostimulants. Due to their self-assembling properties into nanoscaled pathogen mimetic particles, they serve as a supramolecular subunit vaccine toolbox. By developing a universal supramolecular polymer platform, we will construct multipotent vaccines from glycan-decorated peptides, that combine the activity of protein conjugates with the facile handling, precise composition and increased stability of traditional small molecule pharmaceutical compounds. SUPRAVACC will pioneer the design of minimalistic and broadly applicable vaccines, and will evaluate the supramolecular engineering approach for immunisations against antibacterial diseases, as well as for applications as antitumour vaccine candidates. The fundamental insights gained will drive a paradigm shift in the design and preparation of vaccine candidates in academic and industrial research laboratories.