This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. This project aims to identify how the microbiome—the community of bacteria living in and on a host—connects ecological change and developmental differences in wild red squirrels. An individual’s microbiome is inherited in part through maternally-transmitted microbes and can shift in response to environmental changes. How do these shifts in the microbiome relate to variation in development, and are these changes an advantage or disadvantage? The fellow will address these questions using long-term data collected on wild red squirrels living in the Yukon, Canada. Red squirrels are highly territorial and experience exreme fluctuations in food availability, making them an excellent model to examine how the microbiome responds to ecological and social change. This research will provide critical insight into how microbes contribute to the evolutionary processes that allow animals to adapt to changing environments. The fellow will include first-generation and underrepresented students in various aspects of this project and disseminate primary research findings through various existing institutional mechanisms aimed at engaging local communities in the scientific process.
This research synthesizes theory and methods from multiple fields, combining high-resolution genomics with noninvasive hormone analyses while situating the data within an eco-evolutionary framework. This study will use experimental manipulations of population density and food availability to 1) probe interactions between hormonal responses to ecological change and the microbiome, 2) investigate the vertical transmission of microbes from mothers to offspring, and 3) test whether microbial changes predict variation in offspring growth rates. This project will then assess the adaptive value of microbial changes by 4) testing how the microbiome relates to territory acquisition, survival to first breeding, and longevity using both existing longitudinal data and a novel cross-fostering experiment. The fellow will receive integrative training across the fields of genomics, endocrinology, evolutionary biology, and ecology and data will be generated and archived for maximum reproducibility and accessibility. Underserved communities and first-generation students will be engaged in this research through hands-on mini-projects, institutional mentorship programs, and a citizen science community outreach program on red squirrels.
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.
