NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2018

Graham Allie M, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2018, Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. The broad objective of this research project is to understand how coastal marine organisms cope with stressful environmental conditions, specifically situations of extremely low oxygen (hypoxia). The Fellow will perform this project with a common tidepool crustacean, the copepod Tigriopus californicus, which live in tidepools all along the Pacific Coast of the U.S., from Southern California to Alaska, and are subject to potential variation in oxygen content availability. One of the objectives of the project is to compare the different populations with regards to how tolerant they are to hypoxia and then to perform genetic and biochemical analyses to understand which genes are responsible for their physiological differences. Determining the diverse mechanisms that an organism uses to cope with hypoxia will aid in better understanding this fundamental biological constraint. In addition, these experiments will help elucidate the role of interactions between the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes in the process of population divergence, potentially providing insights on conservation biology, medicine, and understanding the sources of new species and biodiversity. The Fellow will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups by coordinating various research and training activities between the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University (OSU), the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program at OSU, Oregon Alliance for Minority Participation (OR-AMP), and OSU's Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB). The Fellow will use functional genomic, transcriptomic, and biochemical tools to characterize the pathways and genes underlying mechanisms of adaptation to low-oxygen environments in the intertidal copepod Tigriopus californicus. This research tackles several questions: (1) Is there variation in hypoxia tolerance among geographically isolated populations? (2) Which cellular pathways are involved in hypoxia response and do they overlap with pathways associated with temperature stress? and, (3) To what extent are adaptations to hypoxia connected to rapid nuclear-mitochondrial coevolution in Tigriopus? To promote participation of groups underrepresented in biology, the Fellow will fully integrate underrepresented minority students into all stages of research endeavors. In addition, the Fellow will coordinate with well-established programs, such as LSAMP and OR-AMP, to develop and run short-workshop activities aimed at training OSU students from minority backgrounds on multiple aspects of scientific research, including the importance of basic research, how to apply to graduate school, as well as basic techniques in bioinformatics. 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.