NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, 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. Fitness can be measured as the number of offspring produced by an individual and is determined by an individual’s genetic makeup and the environment.

For a population to remain stable, each generation of individuals must produce a sufficient number of offspring. This research will investigate the relative roles of individual genetic makeup and the environment in determining fitness for a population of banner-tailed kangaroo rats. The results from this work will be used to create a model designed to predict how fitness, and therefore population stability, respond to changes in the environment and the genetic properties of a population.

This research will shed light on a fundamental question in evolutionary biology (how fitness is determined) while also informing conservation and population management strategies. Describing influences on individual fitness will allow for more robust predictions of long-term stability for populations threatened by environmental change or small population size.

Outreach will include a report and a web-based application to relate population genetics concepts to the public. This will be available as a curriculum plan, reaching a diverse group of educators and students.

The samples to be analyzed in this project are derived from a fully pedigreed population of banner-tailed kangaroo rats that has been monitored since 1980. The Fellow will leverage existing long-term data on this population (familial relationships and lifetime fitness estimates), generate new whole genomic sequence data, and incorporate remote sensing data to identify how genomic variants interact with phenotypes and environmental characteristics to determine individual fitness and, consequently, long-term population stability.

These empirical results will be used to parameterize a spatially-explicit, agent-based model generalizable to other natural systems that can be used to predict the effects of changes in population (e.g., inbreeding, dispersal distances, migration rates) and environmental properties (e.g., resource availability over space) on population stability. Because samples used in this research were collected from private land, the project will include communicating results and discussing land management implications with landowners.

The results of this project will also be used to build a web application and associated educational materials designed to teach undergraduate students concepts of population and conservation genetics.

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.