Leonardo Stari

I successfully enriched a consortium capable of degrading 30 μM CT within one week and demonstrated that Stari2 tolerates CT concentrations up to 5 mM. Utilizing joint Illumina/Nanopore sequencing, I identified specific dehalogenase enzymes and metabolic pathways essential for these strategies.

Using high-resolution time-series data (522 samples), our models have achieved over 90% accuracy in forecasting OTU profiles. We discovered that carbon sources act as deterministic filters and that the "Rare Biosphere" follows distinct successional trajectories compared to abundant taxa.

We investigated how chemically diverse carbon sources act as ecological filters shaping soil bacterial communities. Null model analysis confirmed the carbon source as the primary deterministic filter, enforcing high reproducibility (homogeneous selection governing ~74% of assembly among replicates) and overriding stochastic effects. Crucially, abundant (>1%) and rare (<0.1%) taxa exhibited decoupled assembly mechanisms — while abundant taxa were driven by dispersal limitation (~59%) and variable selection, the rare biosphere displayed a temporal regime shift, transitioning from stochastic isolation to strong deterministic selection (~50%) during later successional stages. This reframes the rare biosphere as a "latent responder" reservoir recruited by metabolic byproducts rather than the primary substrate.