Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Pathogen-Host Genomic Interactions as Drivers of Invasion Success

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. Invasive species threaten ecosystems, native species, crops and people in many ways.

As environments change and invasive species’ ranges expand, these threats have become an urgent issue. Understanding the role that viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens play in the success or failure of species invasions is crucial for mitigating the damage anticipated in the coming years. Wild rodents in New England can help answer this question.

European rodents arrived in New England in the 1600s, bringing pathogens with them that native rodents had never encountered, and encountering pathogens endemic to native rodents for the first time. How these pathogens influenced native and invasive rodent populations can be uncovered using genomics. By observing changes in wild and invasive rodent population dynamics and genomes over the past 400-years and corresponding evolutionary changes in the pathogens, this project will provide a more interconnected understanding of if and how pathogens contribute to invasion success.

The fellow will develop invasive species informational sessions for farming communities, provide active learning opportunities in genomics for 4th grade classes in Vermont, and mentor undergraduate students.

This project will test the Pathogen Release, Pathogen Spillover, and Pathogen Spillback hypotheses through the incorporation of rodent population size estimates, adaptation at Pathogen-Interacting Protein (PIP) sites in the host genomes, and phylogenetic and functional analyses of the most common pathogens detected. To do so, the fellow will generate a time transect of native and invasive rodent metagenomes.

The time transect of rodent populations will identify the timing of invasion-related population demographic shifts in native and invasive rodents of interest. Host genome adaptations in these populations will then be analyzed, focusing on selective sweeps at PIP genes to determine the associations of specific candidate pathogens with these demographic shifts.

Finally, pathogen genomes recovered from historic and modern host specimens will be analyzed in conjunction with PIP selection to directly connect reciprocal coadaptation between pathogens and rodent hosts at candidate genomic loci that may have contributed to invasion success. These results will advance our understanding of species invasions in the past and present, potentially informing measures to mitigate the negative impacts of invasive species in the future.

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.