Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Interplay between structural variants, phenotype, and local adaptation in a cryptic avian complex

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2025. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to biology in innovative ways. Understanding how bird species adapt to their environment is crucial to knowing how they may be affected by our rapidly changing world.

Examples of adaptations include metabolic changes for high altitude survival and cryptic camouflage to remain inconspicuous in various environments. Changes in the genome are often the driving force for these adaptations. These changes range from a single DNA base pair, to more complex structural genetic changes, which can be fifty to thousands of base pairs long.

These longer and more complex structural genetic changes are more likely to overlap with genes, leading to changes in DNA function. However, we do not know exactly how these complex structural changes evolve over time. Thus, determining the impacts of structural DNA changes is critical to understanding how species may be adapting to novel and varied environments.

During this project, the fellow will also build connections between Biology and Art undergraduate students to generate meaningful science communication pieces for public display.

Much of the work on diversification, speciation, and adaptive potential in birds has focused on the use of specific loci, mainly single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and how they correlate with the environment or phenotype. Structural variants (SVs) include aspects of genome architecture, including chromosomal inversions, insertions and deletions, and transposable elements.

These SVs can lead to large regions of the genome that are locked together without recombination. SVs consist of a greater percentage of the genome than SNPs and are more likely to overlap with coding or regulatory regions. However, little is known about whether SVs are directly involved in the speciation process and adaptation.

This project aims to comprehensively fill this gap in knowledge by studying the mechanisms behind environmental adaptation and population structure in the Horned Lark (Eremophila alpestris), a songbird that has extensive variation in plumage, habitat, and genomic architecture. The fellow will use SVs and SNPs to determine both the interplay of these elements as well as their influence on genome architecture and adaptive potential.

This aims to answer the following questions: 1) Which genomic marker type (SV or SNP) best explains population structure? 2) Is the dramatic plumage variation in Horned Lark fueled by structural genomic changes (SVs)? And 3) Do the structural genomic changes (SVs) facilitate adaptation to a local environment? By quantifying all types of genomic variation of a species and generating a new pangenome, this project will form a new model for understanding what genomic mechanisms drive population structure, adaptation, and speciation.

The fellow will also work directly with the Bird Genoscape Project to forge connections with conservation partners and integrate population genomics knowledge of bird species, like the Horned Lark, into conservation strategy frameworks.

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.