NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in emerging areas where biology intersects with other scientific disciplines, in this case with mathematics. The Fellows are expected to lead the nation's scientific workforce of the future. This fellowship to Ross Cunning supports research and training to integrate quantitative genetic and modeling approaches to understand climate change impacts on coral symbiosis. The host institutions for the Fellowship are the University of Hawaii and the University of California, Santa Barbara; the sponsoring scientists are Drs. Ruth Gates and Roger Nisbet. Training goals include genomics, bioinformatics, and dynamic energy budget theory and modeling techniques to examine the coral-zooxanthellae symbiosis. Educational outreach to students in Hawaii includes students from groups under-represented in STEM fields.
The research seeks to understand the dynamic interactions between reef-building corals and their symbiotic algae in an era of global environmental change. The future persistence of coral reef ecosystems depends on the integrity of this symbiosis; stress disrupts the symbiosis, but the processes underlying its regulation and stability, even in the absence of environmental stress, are poorly understood. The approach is to extract molecular information from corals and sea anemones with zooxanthellae raised under various conditions, then model the results and test the outcomes of the models, resulting in a mechanistic understanding of the maintenance and breakdown of symbiosis and integrate "omics"-based molecular data within a Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) model for coral symbiosis. The specific aims are to 1) develop a comprehensive DEB framework to model coral-algal symbiotic interactions, 2) assess environmental influences on symbiosis structure and function with quantitative metagenomic and transcriptomic datasets, and 3) integrate these data within the DEB modeling framework to test diverse hypotheses regarding the regulation and control of symbiosis and predict responses to complex changes in the environment.
