NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology: Evaluate how the spatial distribution of discrete genetic patterns influences ancestry estimation in spatial and nonspatial methods

Jones, Leonard N, Lansing MI

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. This research will evaluate the performance of methods for estimating ancestry using a nontraditional animal system, garter snakes. The research will investigate how genetic variation within species can change across space and complicate ancestry estimation. The last two decades have seen rapid advances in human genomics, the rise of the commercial genealogy industry, and a reassessment of global human diversity and migration history. This project will contribute to the general understanding of evolutionary principles and their applications across the tree of life. The broader impacts of the project include developing a foundation to teach broader audiences the complexity of population identification in light of the social consequences of categorization and workshops designed for scientists to increase knowledge of computational and statistical analysis. Understanding population structure requires disentangling patterns of continuous variation across space from discrete population structure, which can be caused by any combination of demography, introgression, and natural selection. Only recently have ancestry estimation methods begun to jointly consider these two patterns. However, their behavior in complex scenarios, in particular in response to underlying phylogenetic structure and/or genetic contribution from unsampled lineages, is unclear. Using simulated and high-throughput sequence data generated from three sympatric hybridizing garter snakes (Thamnophis) with different distributions, the Fellow will assess how the spatial extent of discrete genetic patterns across space influence ancestry estimation in spatial and nonspatial methods. The Fellow will also extend spatial modeling to jointly infer phylogenetic structure and ancestry amidst continuous variation, therefore advancing methodological tools for the field. The data generated will be amenable to questions beyond the scope of this project and population genetics, making the products of this work valuable to multiple disciplines in biology. The Fellow will use a background in teaching and outreach to disseminate the research to broad audiences. The Fellow will also explore the broad implications of public understanding of population genetics across axes of social importance by developing teaching tools that both increase racial representation in biology, and directly address the racist legacies of the discipline. Furthermore, the Fellow will bridge the gap between theory and application in population genetics by developing conference workshops that cater to researchers without robust backgrounds in computational and statistical analysis. 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.