NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Developmental Patterning of Double-Layered Epithelia and the Evolutionary Origin of Insect Wings

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The Fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. The research aim of the Fellow is to test whether similar structures that occur on different parts of the body are built using similar developmental instructions in diverse insects.

The Fellow will accomplish this by looking at the gene expression within these insects. The results are relevant to a question that has been debated for hundreds of years: how did insect wings evolve? Unlike flighted vertebrates such as bats and birds, insect wings are not simple derivations of a limb, but rather a novel feature with no clear path of evolutionary history.

This research program will not only allow the Fellow, who identifies as a Disabled scientist, to gain new skills, it dovetails with a program to train a cohort of undergraduate students that belong to Groups Under-represented in Biology. This cohort of students will be mentored through an active learning community course over four semesters where they will learn theory and lab skills in a supportive environment before rotating out to complete independent research of their choice at the end of the fourth semester.

This will in turn set these diverse students, and Fellow, up for success in future biological research fields.

Different structures have been hypothesized to be serially homologous to insect wings, from pronotal lobes, to abdominal gills, to leg segments. Recent efforts to evaluate these evolutionary relationships have relied on wing genes identified from Drosophila work, but these genes have not been assessed across other features comprised of the same tissue type as the wing: double-layered epithelia (DLE).

The Fellow’s work will assess the role these genes play in structures made of the same tissue type that are not serially homologous to the wing. Thus, the Fellow will test the assumption of developmental hypotheses on the origin of wings that shared use of this network indicates serial homology with wings. Moreover, little work has been done on the role these wing genes play in developmental patterning of the wings or other DLE structures in the many lineages that separate crustaceans from holometabolous insects, a gap the Fellow’s work aims to fill.

The proposed experiments will test if the expression and function of wing genes is truly unique to wings or if they are more broadly indicative of developmental patterning of double-layered epithelial structures.

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.