BRC-BIO: Uncoiling the ecological and evolutionary drivers of snail-symbiont interrelationships

Arkansas State University Main Campus, Jonesboro AR

Investigators

Abstract

Global change is altering the distributions of parasites and their hosts with potentially grave impacts for wildlife and society. Understanding how shifting environmental conditions across space and time will influence the prevalence and intensity of disease is thus a critical research frontier. This project will uncoil the underlying processes shaping the spatial patterns of host-parasite interactions in a community of freshwater invertebrates and their parasites. Field studies will provide insights into how environmental conditions shape the distribution and genetic diversity of host and parasite species. Outdoor experiments will explore how different types of parasites impact the structure and diversity of host communities over time. Finally, laboratory experiments will reveal the role of genetic factors in determining individual host susceptibility or resistance to parasite infections. The project will train two PhD students and will offer transformative research experiences for undergraduate students. The creation of an online resource on gastropods, the deposition of samples and data in public collections and repositories, and outreach activities to increase awareness of parasites will all contribute to the broader understanding of freshwater biodiversity and its conservation. Metacommunity theory acknowledges that processes at multiple scales interact to affect local community composition, but applying metacommunity concepts to explain concurrent patterns of host and parasites is still in its infancy. And although evolutionary theory acknowledges co-evolutionary arms races, it does not often consider spatiotemporal environmental variation. This project considers the parallels between evolutionary and metacommunity theory and hopes to unify these aspects of ecology and evolutionary biology in the context of symbiotic relationships. This project will use spatial wetland surveys, site-specific water chemistry, remote sensing data, and reduced-representation genomic sequencing to model variance in snail community structure, the presence–absence of parasite species, and population genomic diversity. Infection and community dynamics in control and parasitized groups will be monitored in mesocosm experiments over several months. Finally, a genome-wide association study will be conducted to assess the role of specific alleles and genome-wide heterozygosity on infection probability. This project is jointly funded by the Building Research Capacity of New Faculty in Biology program in the Division of Biological Infrastructure, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Population and Community Ecology program in the Division of Environmental Biology. 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.