NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will utilize biological collections in innovative ways. Copepods are a diverse group of aquatic crustaceans that are among the most abundant animals on the planet.

As key members at the base of the marine food web, copepods support the majority of the world’s fisheries. Nearly half of the 11,000 known species of copepods are parasites, including a number of economically important pathogens of salmon, trout, and other aquatic animals, which cost fisheries hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The Fellow will utilize three of the world’s most significant copepod collections to better understand copepod diversity using DNA sequencing and advanced imaging techniques, with a focus on understanding the evolution of parasitism in this group.

The Fellow will receive training from experts in copepod taxonomy, targeted capture sequencing, and specimen imaging including micro-CT. Collection digitization and imaging efforts will help disseminate collections data to the scientific community and the public, and the Fellow will interact with hundreds of Smithsonian visitors and lead educational outreach events at diverse K-12 schools in the greater Washington DC region to display collection specimens and 3D images.

Copepods are an ideal system for studying parasite evolution because no other comparatively sized animal taxon (1) has evolved to be parasitic on as many separate occasions, (2) contains as many parasitic species (>5,000), (3) parasitizes such a diversity of hosts (>13 phyla), and (4) exhibits such extreme morphological variation. However, the ability to study parasite evolution in this context has been hampered by a lack of molecular data: only 10% of copepod species have publicly available sequence data, and only 5% of known species have been included in a molecular phylogenetic analysis.

To address these shortcomings, the Fellow will leverage three of the largest copepod collections in the world to complete a phylogenomic analysis of copepods using copepod-specific exon capture sequencing probes for over 1,000 loci. The sequencing work, phylogenomic analyses, and collections will enable the Fellow to test the validity of the copepod orders, revise copepod classification, identify appropriate diagnostic characters, and provide accurately identified and vouchered reference sequences to bolster future molecular identification efforts.

With a robust phylogeny across copepod diversity, the Fellow will then examine the evolution of parasitism, convergent morphological evolution, and host colonization.

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.