Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Adaptive responses to complex environmental stress in Saccharomyces cerevisiae at multiple levels: genome, transcriptome, and epigenome.

Sandoval-Powers, Megan A, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment, and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Natural populations experiencing global climate change are threatened by increasingly complex, stressful environments. In these complex environments, the ability of organisms to adapt to a myriad of adverse conditions is essential for survival. As such, there is a need to understand the molecular mechanisms that facilitate adaptation to complex environmental stress. The research aims to support this need by investigating the molecular responses of Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast populations to complex environments using different strengths and combinations of antifungal drug stressors. This research will reveal evolutionary dynamics resulting across a spectrum of environmental complexity, thereby improving predictions of the impacts of climate change on natural populations. The research will also deepen our understanding of the genetic basis of antifungal drug resistance. Mentorship and outreach activities will be implemented in this project to increase participation of students underrepresented in the sciences and broaden education in evolutionary biology, climate change, and drug resistance. The fellow will perform two highly-replicated evolution experiments using a recombinant S. cerevisiae yeast population as the model system to characterize the dynamics and outcomes of adaptation in complex environments. Replicate S. cerevisiae populations will be evolved for 100 generations under low, moderate, and high selection intensities of three antifungal drugs (Aim 1) and in combinations of each drug (Aim 2). Evolved populations from both evolution studies will be phenotyped for fitness changes and sequenced using multi-omics tools (DNA-sequencing, RNA-sequencing, and ATAC-sequencing) to probe evolutionary changes in the genome, transcriptome, and epigenome via modeled comparisons between populations evolved in each environment. Through this research, the fellow will gain invaluable training in the computational analysis of complex “omics” datasets and bolster communication and mentorship skills. To engage in open science efforts, the fellow will incorporate findings from the research into outreach events and broadly disseminate all data, code, and methodologies related to the project. The fellow will broaden participation in science by training and mentoring undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds and by hosting workshops for college students and the public through collaborations with the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation at Oregon State University and the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. 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.