Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY2001

本行动资助2001年度美国国家科学基金会微生物生物学博士后奖学金。该奖学金支持一般不被认为是模式生物的原生动物、微藻、真菌、古细菌、细菌和病毒物种的基本生物学培训和研究。此外，它为最近的博士学位获得者提供了在微生物生物学方面获得额外培训的机会，在知名科学家的赞助下获得研究经验，并在本科和研究生培训期间拓宽他/她的科学视野。这些研究金的进一步目的是帮助新科学家指导他们的研究工作跨越传统的学科界线，并利用独特的研究资源、地点和设施，包括国外的地点。这项研究和培训计划的标题是“尽管微生物的多样性，但最小化翻译和/或突变错误影响的选择能否解释密码子的使用模式？”利用自然分离物和实验室进化实验的比较基因组分析，对由偏密码子使用介导的错误最小化的研究将从细菌扩展到噬菌体寄生虫。首先，本研究进行了初步观察：1)细菌密码子使用偏好的模式似乎反映了对错误最小化的选择；2)噬菌体基因组类型（如dsDNA与ssDNA）似乎影响错误最小化的程度，但不影响噬菌体密码子使用反映宿主密码子使用的程度。

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY2001. The fellowship supports training and research on the basic biology of protozoan, microalgal, fungal, archaeal, bacterial and viral species that are not generally considered to be model organisms. Further, it provides opportunities for a recent doctoral recipients to obtain additional training in microbial biology, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden his/her scientific horizons beyond the research experiences during the undergraduate and graduate training. These fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including foreign locations. The research and training plan is entitled "Can selection to minimize the effects of translational and/or mutational errors explain codon usage patterns in microbes despite their diversity?" The investigation of error minimization mediated by biased codon usage will be extended from bacteria to their bacteriophage parasites, using both comparative genome analyses of natural isolates and laboratory evolution experiments. Primarily, the research pursues the preliminary observations that 1) patterns of codon usage bias in bacteria appear to reflect selection for error minimization, and 2) phage genome type (e.g. dsDNA vs. ssDNA) appears to influence the degree of error minimization, but not the degree to which phage codon usage reflects host codon usage.