 Hello everyone, my name is Damien Finn, and today I would like to talk to you about our recent FEMS Ecology paper entitled Functional Trade Relationships Demonstrate Life Strategies in Terrestrial Prokaryotes. Niche differentiation is the term used to explain how taxa evolved to fill independent niches over time. This is driven by physiological traits that improve their fitness for a given taxa for a given environment. A broadly used view in microbiology of niche is based on resource investment. For example, copiotrophs have traits that invest carbon and energy into rapid growth in response to nutrient input, whereas oligotrophs are equipped with traits that allow for carbon and energy to be invested in biotic and environmental stress tolerance. We asked whether terrestrial prokaryotes separate neatly into these two groups based on their traits, and if so, what are the traits that describe these niches? In a collection of 175 genomes from 35 families where genome-encoded proteins were clustered as traits based on their amino acid sequence similarity, families were found to separate into not two, but rather five completely separate clades, where clade one was enriched with the classic copiotroph traits, clade three was enriched with oligotroph traits, and the other three clades showing independent trends. Our results demonstrate that if one were to consider taxa along a singular axis of resource investment, where certain traits allow for copiotrophic rapid growth on one pole, and oligotrophic stress tolerance on the other, that taxa overlap extensively. Alternatively, we suggest to consider traits for resource investment and also resource acquisition simultaneously. By adding axes for competitive uptake of nutrients, plant degradation, and highly specialized metabolic pathways, we can begin to see how taxa separate in a space that can better explain niche differentiation. While we were able to find some interesting niche trends at the family level, unfortunately with our current data set, we weren't able to dig much deeper. However, if you're interested or have any questions, please feel free to check out our paper and also don't hesitate to send me an email.