NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology

Ramirez-Corona, Bryan A, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Plant Genome Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2023. 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 Bryan Ramirez-Corona is “Duckweed as a multiplexable model to study signal integration with advanced genomic tools.” The host institution for the fellowship is the University of Washington and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Josh Cuperus. Plants form the basis of the food webs that sustain animal life. Climate change and the loss of arable land threaten to drastically reduce agricultural output and negatively affect food security. Understanding plant molecular responses to environmental stressors will be important for building resilient crops capable of sustaining future generations. Existing plant models limit our ability to understand how plants respond to stressors because they cannot test large numbers of conditions efficiently. This work aims to solve existing limitations by measuring plant environmental responses in the smallest and fastest-growing plant family, duckweed. This work will generate tools and information on duckweed that will enable other research groups to study plant biology at a larger scale, speeding up the rate of discovery. Technical and non-technical expertise gained over the course of this research will prepare Bryan for establishing and maintaining an independent research program focused on plant biology. This research will also serve as a background for individual and lab-level equity and inclusion efforts. These efforts include the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the general public by leveraging existing social media outlets and the directed mentorship of diverse students through summer research programs. In nature, plants must be content with complex combinations of environmental inputs, such as temperature, light, acidity, and nutrient availability. However, traditional plant models are relatively large and slow growing, making it difficult to study their transcriptional responses to these inputs. To study how plants modulate cell-type-specific transcriptional responses to combinations of inputs, duckweed will be used as a scalable experimental model. Duckweed species are both the smallest and fastest-growing flowering plants and contain homologous structures to terrestrial plants. Their small size enables them to be grown in a 96-well format, allowing for the testing of many combinations of environmental inputs. This work will establish a dataset of control and condition-specific single-cell gene expression (RNA-seq) and chromatin accessibility (ATAC-seq and FIBER-seq). Three duckweed species will be tested under single and combinatorial treatments of temperature, pH, NO3-, NH4+, and H2PO4-. This work will also establish CRISPR/CAS9 expressing lines for facile targeted mutagenesis. All sequencing data, transgenic lines, and plasmids will be made publicly available through NCBI Sequencing Read Archive, Rutgers Duckweed Stock Cooperative, and Addgene, respectively. 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.