EAGER: Hybridization and metabolic dysfunction in milkweeds

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This research aims to understand how biochemical processes and pathways in the cell are disrupted when mating occurs across species. Two milkweed species, the common milkweed and the showy milkweed, form hybrids across a wide region of the central United States. The research will determine the extent of natural hybridization between these species and identify the cellular pathways that differ between species. This information will allow identification of cellular pathways that are disrupted when hybridization occurs. This work will shed light on both the organization of biochemical pathways and the mechanisms that keep species reproductively isolated. Understanding the effects of hybridization will become increasingly important as climate change and human disturbance cause species ranges to shift and bring previously isolated species into contact. The results of the project will be integrated into undergraduate courses to strengthen bioinformatics and introductory biology courses with a focus on quantitative reasoning, modeling, and simulations.This research addresses a fundamental gap in our understanding of metabolic pathways and how the metabolome changes during speciation. When species evolve in isolation and come back into contact, the hybrids they form often display variation outside of the parental means (transgressive segregation). By studying natural and hand-pollinated hybrids along with the parental species, the researchers will uncover the changes to the genetic architecture that occur as species diverge. The researchers will use (1) genotype-by-sequencing to reconstruct the history of hybridization across the region of sympatry and (2) a comprehensive global metabolomics study to identify how pathways are disrupted following hybridization. These data will identify where pathway changes are likely to accumulate and identify new metabolites of interest. This project is jointly funded by the Evolutionary Processes Cluster in the Division of Environmental Biology and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.