NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology: Evaluate how the spatial distribution of discrete genetic patterns influences ancestry estimation in spatial and nonspatial methods

该行动为2022财年美国国家科学基金会生物学博士后研究奖学金提供资金，扩大生物学中代表性不足群体的参与。该奖学金支持研究员的研究和培训计划，该计划将增加在生物学中代表性不足的群体的参与。本研究将评估使用非传统动物系统，吊袜带蛇估算祖先的方法的性能。这项研究将调查物种内部的遗传变异如何在空间上发生变化，并使祖先的估计复杂化。过去二十年见证了人类基因组学的快速发展，商业家谱产业的兴起，以及对全球人类多样性和迁移历史的重新评估。这个项目将有助于对进化原理的普遍理解及其在生命之树上的应用。该项目的更广泛影响包括建立一个基础，根据分类的社会后果向更广泛的受众传授人口识别的复杂性，并为科学家设计讲习班，以增加计算和统计分析的知识。理解种群结构需要从离散的种群结构中分离出跨越空间的连续变化模式，这可能是由人口统计学、遗传渗入和自然选择的任何组合引起的。直到最近，祖先估计方法才开始联合考虑这两种模式。然而，它们在复杂情况下的行为，特别是对潜在的系统发育结构和/或来自未采样谱系的遗传贡献的反应，尚不清楚。通过对三种不同分布的同域杂交袜带蛇（Thamnophis）的模拟和高通量序列数据，研究员将评估离散遗传模式在空间上的空间程度如何影响空间和非空间方法的祖先估计。该研究员还将扩展空间建模，以共同推断连续变化中的系统发育结构和祖先，从而推进该领域的方法工具。所产生的数据将适用于超出本项目和群体遗传学范围的问题，使这项工作的产品对生物学的多个学科有价值。研究员将利用其教学和外联方面的背景向广大读者传播研究成果。该研究员还将通过开发既增加生物学中的种族代表性又直接解决该学科的种族主义遗留问题的教学工具，探索公众对群体遗传学在社会重要性轴线上的理解的广泛含义。此外，该研究员将通过举办会议讲习班来弥合人口遗传学理论与应用之间的差距，这些讲习班迎合没有强大计算和统计分析背景的研究人员。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2022, Broadening Participation of Groups Underrepresented in Biology. The Fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. This research will evaluate the performance of methods for estimating ancestry using a nontraditional animal system, garter snakes. The research will investigate how genetic variation within species can change across space and complicate ancestry estimation. The last two decades have seen rapid advances in human genomics, the rise of the commercial genealogy industry, and a reassessment of global human diversity and migration history. This project will contribute to the general understanding of evolutionary principles and their applications across the tree of life. The broader impacts of the project include developing a foundation to teach broader audiences the complexity of population identification in light of the social consequences of categorization and workshops designed for scientists to increase knowledge of computational and statistical analysis. Understanding population structure requires disentangling patterns of continuous variation across space from discrete population structure, which can be caused by any combination of demography, introgression, and natural selection. Only recently have ancestry estimation methods begun to jointly consider these two patterns. However, their behavior in complex scenarios, in particular in response to underlying phylogenetic structure and/or genetic contribution from unsampled lineages, is unclear. Using simulated and high-throughput sequence data generated from three sympatric hybridizing garter snakes (Thamnophis) with different distributions, the Fellow will assess how the spatial extent of discrete genetic patterns across space influence ancestry estimation in spatial and nonspatial methods. The Fellow will also extend spatial modeling to jointly infer phylogenetic structure and ancestry amidst continuous variation, therefore advancing methodological tools for the field. The data generated will be amenable to questions beyond the scope of this project and population genetics, making the products of this work valuable to multiple disciplines in biology. The Fellow will use a background in teaching and outreach to disseminate the research to broad audiences. The Fellow will also explore the broad implications of public understanding of population genetics across axes of social importance by developing teaching tools that both increase racial representation in biology, and directly address the racist legacies of the discipline. Furthermore, the Fellow will bridge the gap between theory and application in population genetics by developing conference workshops that cater to researchers without robust backgrounds in computational and statistical analysis.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.