NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology

Verster, Kirsten Isabel, Albany CA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2022, Broadening Participation of Groups Underrepresented in Biology. The Fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. Studies of extremophiles – organisms that live in extreme environments can provide insights into the boundaries of where life is possible. Climate change is expected to cause more extreme environments, highlighting the importance of understanding mechanisms to counter ecological challenges. One predicted impact of climate change is increased salinity of continental water sources, which may lead to the extinction of species due to significant osmotic stress. “Brine flies” are adapted to extreme aquatic habitats, occupying extremely hot, acidic, and salty water bodies in the western USA. This makes them an excellent system to study extremophile evolution. For this research, the fellow will characterize the evolutionary history of the brine flies, as well as sequence their genomes to discover the genetic changes responsible for their unusual adaptation to extreme conditions. To broaden the impact of the work, the fellow will recruit and fund undergraduate mentees from minority-serving programs, and also host community-building short courses in field genetics and entomology. For the proposed project, the fellow will characterize the evolutionary history of brine flies (Diptera: Ephydridae), generating a dated molecular phylogeny of the 34 identified Ephydra species using “barcode” genes. Each species’ tolerance to various water chemistries (e.g. pH, salinity, turbidity, temperature) will be collected to determine natural thresholds for each species, and ancestral character state reconstructions for each characteristic will enable the fellow to characterize how Ephydra evolved to occupy diverse and extreme water chemistry niches. Following this, they will sequence the genomes and transcriptomes of representative Ephydra species in order to determine if expansions, duplications, SNPs, or differential regulation in candidate gene families may have facilitated their adaptation to extreme aquatic niches. This research program will lay the groundwork for future studies that could be approached from a variety of biological disciplines, including population genetics, phylogenetics, experimental evolution, gene editing, and structural biology. To accomplish this goal, the fellow will recruit undergraduate mentees, who will largely be hired and funded from minority-serving programs both at Stanford and the Bay Area community college community, as well as a proposed field genetics module that will aim to build community and thus increase participation and retention of current and future individuals from historically excluded groups in biological research. 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.