NSF PRFB FY23: Methylation and microbes as moderators of genotype-by-environment interactions

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2023, 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. Predicting how organisms will react to climate change is challenging because their responses can seem random or unique to each individual.

Linking processes that drive individual responses to outcomes at the level of populations or species could improve predictions. This project’s main goal is to study how two factors, changes to DNA structure and relationships with microbes, affect responses to the environment. The project investigates patterns in these factors across environments and over time in a grasshopper species.

The project will test how including these factors improves predictions of the impacts of climate change. The fellow will partner with teachers and students at a local community college to find the best methods of explaining the impacts of climate change to broad audiences. The fellow will also involve community college and transfer students in the research process.

The project investigates a rare combination of two significant emerging mechanisms in the study of ecological and evolutionary responses to variation in the environment: CpG methylation and microbiomes. Using a combination of approaches, the fellow will test the hypothesis that epigenetic changes and symbiotic relationships help to relax fitness constraints by improving survival at low elevation and easing temperature constraints on energy gain and fecundity at high elevation.

The fellow will first characterize natural patterns in methylation and microbiomes across elevation, while controlling for genotype by using a field reciprocal transplant experiment. Next, laboratory common garden experiments will establish links between specific environmental factors and their effects on symbionts, methylation patterns, and phenotypic outcomes.

Complementarily, experiments manipulating the microbiome, by feeding grasshoppers with sterile, antibiotic, or probiotic-treated food, will elucidate relationships between the microbiome, methylation levels, and phenotypic outcomes under controlled environments. Lastly, the fellow will analyze patterns in methylation and microbiomes over time in museum specimens, and use historical-contemporary comparisons to test whether these factors can better predict the impact of climate change on this grasshopper system.

The fellow will gain teaching experience through her broader impacts plan, and increase the scope of approaches she uses to tackle her research questions by learning epigenetic methods.

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.