Research interest
My research interests focus on the interactions between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, in particular on the evolution of the mycorrhizal specialization of mycoheterotrophic plants. These non-green plants cheat the belowground interaction between green plants and mycorrhizal fungi, from which they obtain their carbon.
I am currently a postdoc at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) in the group of Prof. Gerhard Gebauer. My goal is to obtain stable isotope natural abundances of mycorrhizal fungi that do not form fruiting bodies.
The aim of my PhD project was to study the diversity, ecology and evolution of the interaction between mycoheterotrophic plants and their mycorrhizal partners. I used high throughput sequencing to characterize the fungal communities in the roots of these plants, combined with phylogenetic reconstruction methods trying to detect common mycorrhizal specialization patterns among the evolutionary independent lineages of mycoheterotrophs. Also, I studied the ecological drivers of mycoheterotrophy at global and local scale. The advisors of my thesis were Dr. Nadia Soudzilovskaia and Prof. Peter van Bodegom.
Publications
2018
Gomes SIF, Merckx VSFT, Hynson NA. 2018. Biological invasions increase the richness of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi from a Hawaiian subtropical ecosystem. Biological Invasions. DOI: 10.1007/s10530-018-1710-7
2017
, , . 2017. Fungal-host diversity among mycoheterotrophic plants increases proportionally to their fungal-host overlap. Ecol Evol. 7:3623–3630. doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2974
Merckx VSFT, Gomes SIF, Wapstra M, Hunt C, Steenbeeke G, Mennes CB, Walsh N, Smissen R, Hsieh T-H, Smets EF, Bidartondo MI. 2017. The biogeographical history of the interaction between mycoheterotrophic Thismia (Thismiaceae) plants and mycorrhizal Rhizophagus (Glomeraceae) fungi. J. Biogeogr. doi:10.1111/jbi.12994
Gomes SIF, Aguirre-Gutiérrez J, Bidartondo M, Merckx VSFT. 2017. Arbuscular mycorrhizal interactions of mycoheterotrophic plants are more specialized than in surrounding green plants. New Phytol 213: 1418-1427. doi:10.1111/nph.14249
Teaching
I am assistant in the MSc. field course ‘Tropical Biodiversity’ taking part in Leiden University (2 weeks) and Danau Girang Field Station, Sabah, Malaysia (2 weeks) organized by Prof. Menno Schilthuizen and Dr. Vincent Merckx.
Students from Leiden University
- Petros Dimitriadis in the MSc project “Ribosomal secondary structure models for Glomeromycotina fungi” in collaboration with Dr. Alexandre Gultiaev (LIACS).
- Janna Horjus in the MSc project “Plant – fungus interactions of the Berkheide dune area” (successfully finished in October 2017)
- Annisa Ratna in the MSc project “Performance of ITS and SSU markers in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi species delimitation” (successfully finished in August 2017)
Collaborations
Prof. Serguei Saavedra (Massachusetts Institute of Technology. USA)
Dr. Nicole Hynson (University of Hawaii, Manoa. USA)
Dr. Martin Bidartondo (Imperial College. UK)
Dr. Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez (Naturalis Biodiversity Center. The Netherlands / University of Oxford. UK)
Dr. Alexandre Gultiaev (Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University. The Netherlands)
Contact
Leiden University, Institute of Environmental Sciences, Einsteinweg 2, 2333 CC Leiden, The Netherlands
Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Vondellaan 55, 2332 AA Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: s.i.gomes@cml.leidenuniv.nl
