Proposal Number 1611943
This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2016, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and teaching plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Jeana Drake is 'Coral skeleton protein evolution: Using ancient and modern skeletal protein data to elucidate coral evolutionary patterns'. The host institution for this fellowship is the University of California, Los Angeles, and the sponsoring scientist is David Jacobs.
The goal of this research is to develop and test evolutionary models of proteins in corals, and how evolution of these proteins relates to climate change over the past 250 million years. The Fellow is using fossil coral collections from the Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, from the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution, and gene sequence data from modern corals housed in university and private aquaria, to study the evolution of coral biomineralization proteins. After employing standard geochemical analyses to confirm the pristine nature of fossil coral specimens, the Fellow is using mass spectrometry to sequence fossil proteins from corals that lived just before or after dramatic climate shifts in the last 250 million years. She is also developing constant evolutionary rate models based on gene sequences from modern corals within the same families as the fossil coral specimens. Finally, the Fellow is testing the validity of these evolutionary rate models using the fossil protein sequences. The Fellow's research examines the evolutionary patterns of corals across climate change events, and will clarify the robustness versus plasticity of individual coral biomineralization proteins.
The Fellow is furthering her skills in geochemistry, molecular biology, and bioinformatics, and managing a research project within a multidisciplinary setting. The Fellow is training undergraduate and graduate students in laboratory methods as well as preparation of manuscripts, posters and presentations. She is doing outreach at a local high school to share research concepts and outcomes with students and to include highly motivated students in laboratory work.
