This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2019, Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. Seasonal environmental change has long fascinated biologists and directs many of our own activity patterns. Seasons often present opposing conditions (e.g., temperature and precipitation in summer versus winter) and plants and animals must have ways to cope with these seasonal changes. For organisms with short generation times, seasonal conditions may effect genetic change through natural selection. Alternatively, organisms may show different phenotypes (traits) in response to different environments, without genetic changes. Or a combination of the two may be occurring. Sea slugs, which are known to exhibit striking variation during their life history, will be analyzed. The sea slug Alderia willowi is found on the California coastline and produces many small larvae during the winter and only a few large larvae during the summer. It has a short generation time and so both genetic change and phenotype variability may play a role. This research is particularly relevant to understanding how organisms may adapt to a changing climate. The Fellow will perform the research activities while mentoring undergraduate students in the bioinformatic analyses that are integral to the research.
The research takes a multi-factorial and integrative approach combining population genetics, gene expression, and physiology to assess the degree of genomic and phenotypic change along seasonal time scales. The Fellow will collect seasonally replicated samples from a single population to search for repeated fluctuations in allele frequencies that coincide with the summer and winter seasons. To determine how patterns of gene expression are influenced by season, the Fellow will conduct lab experiments manipulating the temperature and salinity experienced by slugs collected in the summer and winter. Furthermore, the Fellow and undergraduate mentees will perform physiology experiments throughout the year to document seasonal changes that co-occur with changes in genotype and gene expression. The Fellow will receive training in data analyses, scientific presentation and publication, undergraduate mentorship, workshop design and implementation, and conference organization. Throughout the PRFB tenure, the Fellow will run a bioinformatics workshop at Cal State LA to introduce students to performing analyses on the command line. Several students from this workshop will be recruited to continue collaborating with the Fellow on analyses of the data generated during the PRFB tenure.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
