NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2016

Dal Forno Manuela, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

Postdoctoral Fellow: Manuela Dal Forno Proposal number: 1609022 This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2016, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Manuela Dal Forno is "Using museum specimens to explore the diversity and variation of lichen microbiomes in space and time." The host institution for this fellowship is the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. Eric Schuettpelz and Martin Grube. The goal of this research is to evaluate whether biological collections can be used to study characteristics of the microbiome (microbial communities composed of many species, living within plants, fungi and animals). This research is important because if microbiomes do not change significantly over time while housed in museum specimens (i.e., they represent microbiomes found in living organisms at the time they were collected), this opens up a remarkable opportunity to analyze the microbiomes of millions of samples already deposited in museums worldwide, facilitating the study of many biological questions. This research explores this question using lichens and their microbiomes as a model system. Lichens were long thought to be symbiotic associations of just two organisms (or rarely three), fungi plus photosynthetic algae and/or cyanobacteria. However, we now realize that lichens harbor diverse microbiomes, which may vary over space and time. The Fellow is examining museum lichen collections and testing the hypothesis that observed microbiomes represent those living in the lichen when it was collected (i.e., when it was alive), utilizing new and existing collections of tropical lichens from Brazil, Panama, and Jamaica. The research is risky to the extent that the Fellow may find that microbiomes cannot be adequately characterized from collection specimens, but whether or not this is the case, the findings have broad implications for future research on the microbiome dynamics of lichens and other organisms (e.g., plants) that are maintained under similar museum conditions. The results will also be used to determine how microbiomes vary within and among lichen species, and how they vary with changes in the environment. The Fellow is acquiring valuable training in areas such as comparative microbiome analyses, bioinformatics, and the handling of large data sets and data layers from collections portals, ecological statistics, and the establishment of novel pipelines. During a visit to the Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Graz, Austria, the Fellow will learn the fluorescence techniques and use it on selected samples. All of these new skills are important for developing a strong interdisciplinary research program that merges traditional taxonomy with modern molecular techniques and data analyses. The Fellow is mentoring high school and undergraduate students of historically underrepresented groups, while also creating opportunities for the inclusion of lichens in all levels of education. Internships and public outreach activities are utilizing existing programs available at the National Museum of Natural History, and being expanded to local citizen science communities and institutions in the greater Washington DC metropolitan area. Educational products include protocols, portfolios and field guides for lichen identification.