NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in biology and provide them an opportunity to establish international collaborations and take advantage of research facilities and opportunities abroad. Forging strong international collaborations is mutually beneficial to the U.S. and the foreign hosts. The fellowship to Carly D. Kenkel supports a research and training plan to investigate the evolution of symbiont transmission mode using reef-building corals as a model system. The research will advance basic scientific knowledge concerning the evolution of mutualisms and elevate understanding of the coral-algal symbiosis, the foundation of one of the most ecologically and economically important ecosystems on earth. The host institution is The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Line Bay. Training goals include acquiring expertise in novel biochemical techniques, next-generation sequencing methods and bioinformatics analyses. Educational and public outreach activities include establishing a high school internship program at AIMS in collaboration a local school. This fellowship is being funded jointly by the Office of International and Integratiave Activities and the Directorate for Biological Sciences.
Symbioses are ubiquitous in the natural world, yet little is known about how transmission mode evolves in any system. Reef-building corals are a good system in which to study this question because symbiont transmission mode has diverged repeatedly and recently across coral lineages. This research tests the hypothesis that vertical symbiont transmission (direct transfer of symbionts from parent to offspring) stabilizes mutualistic relationships. Laboratory experiments use biochemical and physiological assays to quantify resource sharing between coral hosts and algal symbionts in closely related corals with different symbiont transmission strategies. Comparative genomic methods are being used to identify genes involved in the evolution of different transmission modes by looking for signatures of selection.
