Environmental factors change with reproducible characteristics. While changes in oxygen can happen within seconds to minutes, temperature changes occur at a much slower pace over hours to days. Regulatory networks in an organism are tuned through evolution to elicit a response that matches the characteristics of a given environmental factor (e.g. a rapid response to fast changing factors). The overarching hypothesis of this project is that the relative use of regulation at different stages of information processing (transcriptional, post-transcriptional, translational and post-translational) is dictated by the necessary characteristics of an environmental response. In order to test this hypothesis under varying environmental conditions, changes in synthesis and degradation rates will be measured for all transcripts and proteins in strains of Halobacterium salinarum. Building in this proof-of-concept, the research project will systematically investigate interplay across different levels of regulation in the context of specific environmental responses.
BROADER IMPACTS: Resources: This research will generate fundamental principles of integration across different levels of regulation, and also generate innovative computational and experimental methodology that will be published as well-documented, open-source data and software.
Education: Rapid advances in interdisciplinary science are widening the gap in the way biology is taught and how it is practiced. An award winning high school (HS) education program in the lab is bridging this divide through inquiry-based teaching practices at the grassroots. This ten-year-old program is centered on summer internships for students of disadvantaged backgrounds who are encouraged to apply through numerous partnerships including programs for inner city youth and a UW-based program for advancement of women in science. Educational kits developed through this program have been aligned with state standards, iteratively improved through classroom pilots, and disseminated through professional teacher development to 14 states across the US. In addition to training postdoctoral fellows in systems biology, this project will also develop inquiry-driven, standards-based, HS educational materials. Developed together with local science educators, this novel curriculum module has been requested by teachers and will help students internalize the concepts and methods for using systems biology to understand cellular dynamics in the context of environmental change. These curricula will be aligned with the new Next Generation Science Standards and regularly assess its impact on student learning and career choices through a rigorous evaluation program.
