The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Andrew R. Whiteley to work with Dr. Louis Bernatchez at University Laval in Canada.
The primary goals of this project are to advance understanding of adaptive evolution from the level of the genotype, to gene expression, to phenotype and to interpret adaptive patterns within the context of evolutionary history and conservation. The PI and host will conduct a detailed analysis of how zebrafish (Danio rerio) in their native range in India have adapted to high and low velocity aquatic habitats. They will compare populations from two high velocity lotic environments (rivers) to two low velocity lentic environments (ponds/lakes) within and between two geographically separate regions. Also they will combine analyses of variation in allele frequencies of genes important for swimming performance, expression levels at the same set of genes, swimming physiology, and morphology for a comprehensive analysis of adaptive response to differences in water velocity, as well as conducting a phylogeographic analysis of genetic differentiation at neutral molecular markers across India. This analysis will allow interpretation in the traits analyzed (from gene frequency to phenotype) in terms of evolutionary divergence among populations and allow them to consider the effects of genetic drift on this suite of characters because it will provide an estimate of neutral genetic differentiation. In addition, tests for parallel phenotypic evolution, the independent evolution of the same trait in closely related lineages, to high and low velocity habitats will be used to understand the role of natural selection in shaping phenotypic variation. This combination of analysis from gene, to gene expression, to phenotype is possible because studies of wild populations of zebrafish can build on the incredibly detailed knowledge of development and molecular genetics as well as the enormous array of molecular tools that we already possess for this species. This research promises to fill a void in our understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of organismal adaptive evolution. Moreover, this research will also provide information on the evolutionary history of zebrafish in India and thus, an initial understanding of the conservation units of a fish species in a country with very high human population densities and pressing conservation concerns in its highly varied habitat types (some of which are considered biodiversity hot spots).
