This action funds an NSF National Plant Genome Initiative Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2013. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow who also presents a plan to broaden participation in biology. The title of the research and training plan for this fellowship to Christopher J. Friedline is "Barking up the Right Trees: the Influence of Forest Fire on the Genetic Architecture of Pine Populations in the Southeastern United States." The host institution for the fellowship is the Virginia Commonwealth University, and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Andrew J. Eckert.
The main goal of this project is to investigate the underlying genetic architecture associated with bark thickness as a fire-adapted phenotype in four, economically-important, closely-related, species of pines with a range along the eastern and southeastern United States. Using next-generation, genotype-by-sequencing approaches, the study will determine the degree to which the genetic architecture for this complex trait is shared across natural ranges and multiple evolutionary time scales, and how the variability observed can inform breeding plans to minimize the negative financial impact that bark mass has on the forest industry. This research will 1) provide new genomic resources for non-model species; 2) augment existing plant genomic resources; 3) address fundamental principles in evolutionary biology; and 4) serve to inform and improve breeding programs and land management initiatives.
Training objectives include evolutionary genetics, high-throughput functional genomics, and next-generation sequencing. Broader impacts of this project include the development of a new course to train both graduate and advanced undergraduate students in the computational and analytical skills necessary to address micro- and macro-evolutionary questions using large data sets, such as those generated by next-generation sequencing technologies. This course will be open to students from the Biology, Bioinformatics, and Life Sciences departments at VCU. The fellow will bring to bear his skills in computational biology and molecular evolution and newly apply them to plant genomics. All data and computer code will be made available to the scientific community via public FTP and project web sites as well as through long-term public repositories such as GenBank, Dryad, and TreeGenes.
