Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Microbial Biology for FY2001

这一行动为2001财年NSF微生物生物学博士后奖学金提供了资金。该奖学金支持关于原生动物、微藻、真菌、古生物、细菌和病毒物种的基本生物学的培训和研究，这些物种通常不被认为是模式生物。此外，它还为最近的博士获得者提供了获得微生物生物学方面的额外培训的机会，在知名科学家的赞助下获得研究经验，并在本科生和研究生培训期间拓宽其科学视野，超越研究经验。这些奖学金还旨在帮助新科学家引导他们的研究工作跨越传统的学科界限，并利用独特的研究资源、地点和设施，包括外国地点。这项研究和培训计划的标题是“选择将翻译和/或突变错误的影响降至最低能否解释微生物中密码子的使用模式，尽管它们具有多样性？”对偏向密码子使用的误差最小化的研究将从细菌扩展到它们的噬菌体寄生虫，使用自然分离株的比较基因组分析和实验室进化实验。首先，这项研究追求的初步观察是：1)细菌中密码子使用偏向的模式似乎反映了错误最小化的选择，以及2)噬菌体基因组类型(例如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.