Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Rules of Life: Snake venom as a model for understanding the origins and evolution of gene regulatory networks

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, 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. The research will use snake venom as a model system to develop hypotheses for how new gene regulatory networks (GRNs) evolve, which will increase our understanding of the ‘rules of life’ that link genomic processes to variation in organismal phenotypes.

The project will also utilize cellular variation to test hypotheses for the function of GRN components, which will be applicable to any eukaryotic system. Further, findings from the research will contribute profoundly to advancing our understanding of how snake venom is regulated. The World Health Organization identified snake envenomation as a priority neglected tropical disease and a better understanding of snake venom regulation stands to improve the treatment of snakebite with the potential to impact millions globally.

The overarching goal of the fellow’s research is to use snake venom as a model system to investigate mechanisms underlying the evolution of gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that control phenotypic traits. More specifically, the project objectives are to understand how complex traits are regulated, how GRNs arise through the re-wiring of existing physiological and genomic components, and to identify the mechanisms that shape cellular and evolutionary variation in organismal phenotypes.

To accomplish these project objectives, the fellow will test mechanistic hypotheses for snake venom GRN evolution and function by integrating across multiple biological scales, from organismal-level phenotypes, to tissues, to single-cells. The fellow’s approach will leverage evolutionary variation to develop tissue-level hypotheses for the function and evolution of novel GRNs.

Further, the fellow will integrate single-cell experiments to (I) test the roles of specific GRN elements, and (II) understand how cellular heterogeneity manifests in organismal-scale traits. The project will build upon the fellow’s skills in bioinformatics to expand the fellow’s training in the analysis and interpretation of functional genomic data at the tissue and single-cell levels.

Further, the fellow will gain new experience in developing and implementing predictive models for testing GRN hypotheses, which will contribute profoundly to the fellow’s development as a computational biologist. The fellow will also be involved in implementing computational workshops (for 50 undergraduates from any institution) designed to encourage students from underrepresented groups to embrace computational biology.

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.