NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology

Bird, Kevin A, Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Plant Genome Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2022. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow who also presents a plan to broaden participation in biology. The title of the research and training plan for this fellowship to Kevin Bird is "The reciprocal interaction of genetic variation and network topology in trait evolution" The host institution for the fellowship is the University of California-Davis and the sponsoring scientists are Dr. Daniel Kliebenstein and Dr. J. Grey Monroe. For living things to survive they must appropriately respond to changes in the environment or the appearance of genetic mutations. This is especially true for plants, where physically moving away from environmental stresses is not always possible. Being able to maintain vital functions in the face of mutations or environmental change is called robustness. Organisms must also be able to adapt to changing environments through natural selection and to do this, mutations need to produce a heritable change in phenotype. How organisms can be both robust to mutations and able to adaptively evolve to new environments has been difficult to answer. This project focuses on how interactions among genes change the effect of a mutation, sometimes preventing harmful effects and other times producing a change that may help adapt to a new environment. It also explores how mutations can change the way genes interact with each other.The PI will use the latest technologies, including genomic sequencing and CRISPR gene editing, to study how interactions among genes change between wild plants in the model species Arabidopsis thaliana, the crop plant Brassica oleracea (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage) and the biofuel crop Camelina sativa. These results will help us understand more about the processes of evolution so we can harness this knowledge for plant breeding and conservation efforts to respond to rapidly changing climates. The PI will also use knowledge from this work and his past research to contribute to ongoing projects to create biology curricula that reduce racial prejudice and bias among students. Organisms respond to their environments by integrating external stimuli across genetic networks to produce necessary biological responses. Theory predicts that to ensure fitness during harsh conditions, optimal genetic networks must be robust, i.e. maintain function in the face of perturbations incurred from mutations. In robust networks, the phenotypic effects of single-gene knockouts are often masked. Organisms, however, cannot be too robust otherwise their phenotype will be too rigid to genetically adapt to pressures from a changing environment. An emerging model of gene network evolution emphasizes that networks are composed of subcomponents that are interconnected and interactive. Under this model, changes to any number of genes can modulate gene networks, and a mutation’s propensity to cause phenotypic change depends on its context within the network. Using natural Arabidopsis accessions, the PI will analyze variation among accession-specific gene coexpression networks and identify network topology features associated with adaptive alleles. The PI will extend these results using new pangenomes for five Brassicaceae species, including both cultivated and wild species, and will test predictions of associated network features with targeted CRISPR knockouts in Arabidopsis. The results will shed light on how evolution and network topology interact to produce complex traits and pave the way to use the knowledge gained to predict epistatic interactions that can inform future plant breeding and conservation efforts. As part of this project, the PI will also build on ongoing work to design genetics curricula that reduce racial prejudice and bias in students by addressing students’ pre-existing beliefs in genetic essentialism. 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.