Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Drivers and consequences of insect diet shifts over evolutionary timescales

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. For many years, scientists have tried to understand how insects evolved to have such a wide diversity of diets.

Previous research has revealed that insect diets are determined both by their habitats and by the structure and function of their bodies. Further, some insects host symbiotic bacteria that also may further affect their diets. Over millions of years, insect diets have shifted, and these shifts have driven the formation of new species.

However, the exact relationship between diet shifts and species formation remains unclear, as does the relationship between bacterial symbionts and host insect diet shifts. This research will use data from insect and microbial genomes to uncover how diet changes have shaped insect evolution. Results from this work will be important to biology and may have practical applications that could benefit agricultural pest control.

Additionally, the fellow will benefit from training in scientific imaging and computational approaches. The fellow will also mentor undergraduate and high school trainees, which will contribute to the fellow’s professional development and support the next generation of biologists.

The fellow will reconstruct evolutionary diet shifts in the seed bugs (superfamily Lygaeoidea), which have evolved many different diets. The fellow will infer a new phylogenetic tree of the seed bug superfamily by extracting genomic DNA from hundreds of insect samples. The new phylogeny will be used to reconstruct diet shifts within the seed bug lineage and test if ancestral diet shifts are associated with increased speciation.

The fellow will then dissect bug samples to characterize bacteriomes, specialized organs that house symbiotic bacteria in some species. Finally, the fellow will perform metagenomic sequencing on bug specimens to identify symbiont species within the host’s microbiome; understanding the composition of the seed bug microbiome will increase understanding of the microbiome’s function in diet.

This work will provide the fellow with professional training in insect dissection, fluorescent imaging and microscopy, and bioinformatics. In addition to this study, the fellow will mentor undergraduate and high school students in research. The fellow will also attend meetings with agricultural researchers to disseminate findings on economically important pest insects that may innovate future agricultural practices.

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.