NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2022: The role of genomic preadaptation and physiological state in modulating bacterial invasion success

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2022, 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. In this work, the Fellow will investigate the complex interactions between genetics and the environment that allow a bacterial species to successfully invade a new environment.

Bacteria usually fail to invade a host and cause disease, but sometimes they succeed and can cause severe infections when they do. The traits these bacteria have, and conditions which help them achieve this invasion are not well-understood, especially because studies usually only focus on successful invasion without comparing to failed invasions. The Fellow will quantify invasion success across a diverse set of bacteria isolated from different environments, determine the influence of growth conditions, and develop a machine-learning approaches to link invasion outcomes to genetics.

The project aims to predict invasion success in un-tested strains. The Fellow will also broaden participation in science through the recruitment and training of undergraduate students, specifically targeted towards providing equitable access to research opportunities.

This project seeks to better understand the genetic and environmental interactions underlying transitions to pathogenicity by studying the variation in invasion success across strains of the phylogenetically diverse opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The Fellow will first determine this variation in invasion outcomes by quantifying the bacteria’s ability to establish in a novel environment containing a competitor species and will assess the role of phylogenetic relatedness and genomic factors in predicting that success.

Next, they will quantify the impact of different physiological states, induced by the bacteria’s growth conditions before introduction to their novel environment, on invasion outcomes. Finally, the Fellow will integrate these data to compare general and specific predictive models to quantify the potential for future invasion success in un-tested strains.

Throughout the project, the Fellow will gain skills in bacterial genetics, quantifying bacterial traits, and will learn to develop machine learning models to predict phenotypic outcomes from genomic information. In addition to mentoring undergraduate students, the Fellow will engage in scientific outreach aimed at fostering understanding and appreciation for science, with a specific focus on historically underserved institutions.

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.