This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biosciences Related to the Environment for 1998. This fellowship provides an opportunity for the Fellow to gain additional scientific training beyond the doctoral degree and to pursue innovative and imaginative research into the fundamental mechanisms underlying the interactions between organisms and their environment at the molecular, cellular, organismal, population, community and/or ecosystem level in any area of biology supported by the Directorate for Biological Sciences of the National Science Foundation. Each fellowship supports a research and training plan to be carried out in a sponsoring laboratory. The research and training plan for this fellowship is adaptation of bacteria to acidic and alkaline environments. This research examines the adaptive responses of laboratory popultions of Eschericia coli to changes in environmental pH. The evolution of fitness and metabolic efficiency is being followed over 100 generations in acidic, alkaline, variable, and control environments to address a number of specific questions of general interest to evolutionary biologists and to lay the groundwork for understanding the physiological mechanisms of adaptation.
