NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Hybridization on the adaptive landscape

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, 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. How do new species arise?

Do they arise in isolation? Or can hybridization, the exchange of genetic material between species, instead facilitate adaptation, and speed up the speciation process? Recently, there has been growing support for the latter hypothesis but, to date, few studies have experimentally demonstrated that hybridization influences aspects of evolutionary fitness, such as survival, in vertebrate species.

This project will address this by combining laboratory studies of feeding performance, fitness experiments in the field, and genetic sequencing of three species of Bahamian pupfish. This research will provide insight into the capacity of hybridization to facilitate adaptation to climate-change associated environmental shifts. The Fellow will expand participation by involving the Bahamian community both in educational and collaborative opportunities, as well as by conducting outreach involving local public schools and community colleges within the Bay Area.

Can gene flow promote adaptive radiation? To address this question, the Fellow will conduct a comprehensive field fitness experiment, integrating genomic, morphological, environmental, and feeding performance data. The Fellow will also quantify the extent to which the visual environment modulates the phenotype-performance-fitness map.

Using 4,000 experimental hybrids and purebred species, the Fellow will measure fitness in high- and low-turbidity lakes and feeding performance of hundreds of these fish will be assessed in similar environments pre- and post-experiment. These data will be used to construct a genome-phenotype-performance-fitness map, demonstrate the functional consequences of adaptive introgression, and test the hypothesis that environment modulates the phenotype-performance-fitness map.

With this experiment, the Fellow will quantify the sensitivity of the relationship between morphology, performance, and fitness to a hurricane-induced environmental perturbation of lake turbidity. Gaining this understanding is critical to predicting the sensitivity of San Salvador Island’s micro-endemic pupfish diversity to increased hurricane activity in coming years.

This research will provide the Fellow with a diversity of training, from fish care to performance assays, field experiments, selection and genomic analyses. The Fellow will establish a collaboration at the University of The Bahamas, providing training to their students, and offer lessons on evolution to students at the San Salvador Island High School.

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.