Jérôme Comte
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Department of Ecology and Genetics
Limnology Evolutionary Biology Centre
Uppsala University Norbyvägen 18 D
75236 Uppsala
Sweden
T: +46 (0)18 471 2706
http://www.ebc.uu.se/limno/staff/Jerome_Comte/home.html
Postdoctoral Fellow, Uppsala University (Sweden)
2004-2010, Ph.D. in Biology, Université du Québec à Montréal (Québec, Canada). Supervisor: Paul del Giorgio.
2001-2002, DEA in ecology of mountain ecosystems. Université de Grenoble 1/Université de Savoie (France).
Supervisors: Isabelle Domaizon, Stéphan Jacquet and Dominique Fontvieille.
1997-2001, Undergrad studies. Université de Bourgogne (France).
After decades of researches on aquatic bacterial community metabolism and composition, there is clear evidence that aquatic bacteria are extremely sensitive and reactive to changes in environmental conditions. Less clear are the mechanisms that underlie these responses. Understanding the forces that shape bacterial communities is of major importance because these microorganisms are key players of aquatic ecosystems functioning. In the contemporaneous global change context such issue appears critical to understand and predict bacterial and, to a larger scale, ecosystem functioning response to changes in the environment.
My research interests focus mainly on testing ecological theories in natural bacterial communities. In particular, I am interested in understanding the mechanisms that determine the type of bacterioplankton communities response to environmental gradients as well as bacterioplankton biogeography. In this regard, my researches explore the contribution that bacterial community composition, metabolic plasticity and functional redundancy play in this response and how community metabolism and function is linked to community diversity and composition. I am further interested in the source of bacterial community dispersal and their impact on local community composition.
My PhD studies at UQÀM (Québec, Canada) supervised by Paul del Giorgio, have addressed one of the main contemporary issues in aquatic microbial ecology, that is, the links that exist between the functioning of these communities and the environmental forcing, and how these links may be modulated by the composition of the community. I explored these issues in a metacommunity framework, by following bacterial successions along environmental transitions and interfaces between aquatic habitats in an entire watershed and showed that the above relationships only exist in a dynamic manner that contrasts with the classical deterministic view of bacterial communities. The results have further shown that the response of bacteria were mainly determined by emergent properties of bacterial communities such as the level of metabolic plasticity and functional redundancy and that community composition always plays a role by either determining the level of plasticity and redundancy or by a replacement of the main phylotypes that were intrinsically less plastic.
My Post-doc research at the limnology department of Uppsala University explore more especially the relative importance of dispersal and seed banks for bacterioplankton communities diversity and function. This project, co-supervised by Silke Langenheder, Eva Lindström and Lars Tranvik, is intended to increase our understanding of the magnitude of bacterial response to drastic environmental change and their consequences in terms of ecosystem functioning. In particular, I am interested in the contribution of bacterial inputs in lakes from sediments and the air in terms of the overall community response to steep environmental gradients. To test this, I expose lake bacterial communities that differ in regards to their proximity to oceanic influences (i.e. gradient from coastal to inland lakes) to gradual marine environmental conditions in both laboratory and in situ experiments. The main objectives are to 1- investigate whether freshwater bacterial community diversity tend to become similar to the diversity and composition of marine assemblages or saline lakes; 2- investigate the sources of marine bacteria potentially emerging in freshwater systems after marine condition perturbation; 3- investigate the metabolic and functional response of freshwater bacterial communities in response to marine conditions.
Comte, J., and del Giorgio, P.A. Determining the role of community composition in the metabolic response of freshwater bacterioplankton communities to environmental gradients. The ISME Journal, submitted.
Maurice, C.F., Bouvier, T., Comte, J., Guillemette, F., and del Giorgio, P.A. (2010) Seasonal variations of phage life strategies and bacterial physiological states in three northern temperate lakes. Environmental microbiology, 12: 628-641.
Comte, J., and del Giorgio, P.A. Linking the patterns of change in composition and functional capacities in bacterioplankton successions along environmental gradients. Ecology, 91: 1466-1476.
Comte, J., and del Giorgio, P.A. (2009) Links between resources, C metabolism, and the major components of bacterioplankton community structure across a range of freshwater ecosystems. Environmental microbiology, 11: 1704-1716.
Comte, J., Domaizon, I., Fontvieille, D., Viboud, S., Paolini, G., and S. Jacquet. (2006) Microbial community structure and dynamics in the largest natural French lake (Lake Bourget). Microbial Ecology, 52: p72-89.