Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Investigating lichen holobionts' response to climate change from metabolic phenotype to species distributions.

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. All organisms are influenced by their microbiomes and their environment.

Lichens are a prime example. Fungi, algae, and bacteria grow together in symbiosis to form a lichen individual. They are also key parts of biodiversity in rapidly warming arctic and alpine habitats.

However, many predictions of lichens’ responses to environmental change ignore the responses of the microbial partners. Lichens faced with stressful conditions may rely on benefits from the partners to survive and grow. Alternatively, poorly performing partners may hinder responses to stress.

The project will explore how microbes influence performance by transplanting a lichen across its range, along with characterizing the microbial community and its activity. The fellow will develop models to predict how lichen ranges may shift into the future. The research will also contribute to basic understanding of population biology in an understudied kingdom of life, fungi.

The composition of symbiotic partners within lichens varies across environmental gradients suggesting that engaging with locally adapted partners broadens the set of environments in which the lichen holobiont can persist, but this hypothesis is untested. The project will explore how microbial interactions shape the distribution of the lichen, Vulpicida pinastri, by integrating microbial metabarcoding and metabolomic analyses with a range-wide reciprocal transplant experiment and analysis of size-structured population models.

Specifically, the fellow will characterize (1) the relationship between holobiont microbial community composition and metabolic phenotype, (2) how the phenotype that emerges from these microbial interactions influences fitness across environments, and (3) how novel environments may lead to shifts in microbial community composition. Individual lichen thalli will be transplanted across elevations at three latitudinal sites spanning the lichen’s broad North American distribution.

To broaden participation in science, the fellow will mentor undergraduate researchers and develop teaching modules with authentic scientific context for high school students. In addition, the fellow will increase public availability of community observations of fungi by connecting widely used but currently distinct online platforms for biodiversity data.

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.