Postdoctoral Fellowship FY22: Cis-regulatory basis of developmental plasticity and growth in the development and evolution of beetle horns, a class of highly diversified weapons

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY22, 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 organisms develop is regulated through the interactions of genes and environmental conditions like nutrition.

Gene regulation (turning genes “on” or “off”) therefore is an important point of control for many aspects of development, such as growth. Further, when gene regulation is modified by evolution, it can lead to the emergence of new traits. Yet, exactly how gene regulation is controlled is not fully understood.

The fellow will research horned beetles, which are well known for their diverse forms of environment-dependent development, in order to understand how environment affects gene regulation to promote diversity. The fellow will also perform K-12 outreach and education.

Nutrition-responsive and male/female dimorphic traits are among the fastest evolving phenotype classes, yet the contribution of cis-regulatory elements like enhancers and promoters in facilitating or hindering such diversification is still relatively unexplored. This research seeks to better understand the interplay between molecular and environmental factors in the development and evolution of beetle head horns, behaviorally and ecologically significant structures.

Horn formation is restricted to males in most species, and may be further elaborated as alternative horned or hornless male morphs depending on larval nutrition. In other species, such nutrition-responsive development has been lost or even reversed such that females now grow elaborate head horns. The fellow will 1) characterize the roles of chromatin accessibility and regulatory element sequence in regulation of beetle horn development within species; 2) perturb horn gene network function to gain mechanistic insight into the epigenetic architecture underlying horn formation; and 3) analyze how regulatory elements have evolved to drive diversification of beetle horn shape and size across species.

Collectively, this proposal will provide fundamental insight into the role of cis-regulatory elements in the evolutionary development of traits across multiple axes of biological diversification of relevance across the tree of life. This research will be directly integrated with two broader impact efforts including creating high school summer research opportunities in bioinformatics at Indiana University and developing educational resources on genomics for K-12 schools in south-central Indiana.

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.