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. It is increasingly clear that the microscopic organisms that inhabit the human gut (i.e., the microbiome) play a major role in human health. However, the microbiome is not static. Rather, species within the microbiome continue to acquire new mutations and evolve on a timescale that is relevant for human health. This award provides support that will enable the fellow to characterize key evolutionary features of the human microbiome and examine how these features affect the species composition of the human gut, questions that have implications for human health. Because knowledge of evolutionary processes is essential to understand the natural world, the fellow will work to help the public embrace evolution through outreach activities that center the microbiome.
This project will primarily focus on inferring the distribution of fitness effects (DFE) of populations in the human microbiome, a key parameter for determining the course of evolution. To infer the DFE and examine its evolutionary and ecological consequences, the fellow will develop computational and statistical tools that can be applied to empirical data. First, the fellow will determine the degree that the DFE can be inferred solely using information contained in the distribution of allele frequencies within microbial populations. The fellow will then work to incorporate information from correlations between allele frequencies that arise as a result of alleles being on the same chromosome. The degree the DFE can be inferred and correlations incorporated will be ground-truthed using population genetic theory and computational simulations of evolutionary dynamics. Variation in the shape of the DFE across species as well as the degree that the shape depends on species composition will be assessed using publicly available microbiome metagenomic datasets. At UCLA, the fellow will receive educational and career development training, focusing on data science and management, participating in and developing workshops at the UCLA Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences, undergraduate and graduate student mentoring, and collaborating with researchers across a range of scientific disciplines. Outreach efforts will consist of incorporating evolution and the microbiome into zero-fee educational programs at UCLA, Letters to a Pre-Scientist, and Skype a Scientist.
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.
