Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Characterizing the history of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a globally-significant amphibian pathogen, with historic and sedimentary DNA

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 who will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. This research will delve into the deep-time record of amphibians to understand how they have been impacted by climatic shifts and Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a pathogen that has driven devastating global declines in amphibians.

To do so, the project will develop new genetic tools that will demonstrate how we can study the DNA of pathogens and their hosts across tens of thousands of years. Understanding the origin, ecology, and evolution of emerging pathogens like Bd is critically important, as the rising severity and incidence of emerging infectious disease events have profound impacts on public health, agriculture, and ecosystem resilience.

Similarly, we can better respond to the current climate crisis if we can understand how climate-sensitive groups like amphibians have responded to past climatic shifts—and how climatic shifts and past disease outbreaks may have interacted. The PI will additionally continue ongoing work focused on increasing the linguistic diversity of science and will mentor undergraduates in applied amphibian research.

This project comprises three specific research aims alongside two broader impact aims. Firstly, the PI will design custom genetic baits to selectively enrich and sequence DNA from Bd and the amphibians it infects, even when highly contaminated and fragmented. Secondly, she will use the new Bd baits to genotype Bd from amphibian museum specimens in three geographic putative points of origin for the pathogen to discover whether the 1970s-90s Bd epizootics in amphibians can be attributed to the global spread of a new Bd lineage.

Thirdly, she will deploy both Bd and amphibian baits on ancient sediment cores from each of the putative geographic points of origin for panzootic Bd to explore how climatic shifts and the arrival of novel Bd lineages have contributed to amphibian community turnover over millennia. Fourthly, she will continue working towards a more multilingual academy, including publishing on how publishing science in multiple languages affects the frequency and geography of citations.

Finally, the PI will mentor undergraduates in characterizing where are when navigational apps may divert traffic directly over local, spatiotemporally specific newt migration routes.

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.