Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Understanding virus-mediated shifts in host genomes and phenotypes in a model evaporative system

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. Viruses play a pivotal role in shaping microbial host genomes and phenotypes and ultimately influence microbial diversity, species evolution, and global-scale biogeochemical cycles. Despite ongoing climate change-induced alterations in environmental conditions, the current understanding of how these changes affect viral dynamics is lacking. The fellow will conduct a project that will help fill this knowledge gap by evaluating how increasing osmotic and ionic stress influences viral-mediated shifts in microbial genomes and phenotypes. Specifically, the fellow will enable the complete evaporation of seawater in a controlled experimental setting and measure changes in microbial host-virus dynamics. Additionally, the fellow will i) provide high school and colleges students with hands-on research experience working with bioinformatic data and viral samples and ii) mentor STEM-curious students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Climate change-induced global evaporative loss is impacting numerous shallow aquatic environments by increasing salinity, and thereby osmotic and ionic, stress. The fellow will explore the influence of these shifting stresses on viral activity and how these changes affect microbial host genomes and phenotypes to determine the large-scale effects of these changes on microbial evolution and global biogeochemical cycling. The fellow will use metagenomic and viromic approaches combined with flow cytometry to track changes in microbial and viral community abundance and diversity, microbial activity, and viral influence on microbial host metabolism. Additionally, several microbial host-virus systems will be isolated and characterized to identify how salinity-driven changes in viral activity influence isolated microbial host growth rates, burst sizes, and respiration rates. These results will enable a stronger understanding of how environmental-driven changes in viral dynamics affect microbial host genomes and phenotypes as well as global-scale carbon cycling. The project will allow the fellow to master bioinformatic and microscopy techniques and gain hands-on teaching and mentoring experience. The fellow will also enhance awareness and accessibility of bioinformatic tools in environmental biology by forming a bioinformatic learning community and educating interested students on ways in which diverse bioinformatic techniques can be incorporated into their own research. 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.