BII: Life without water: protecting macromolecules, cells, and organisms during desiccation and rehydration across kingdoms of life

地球上的生命是在海洋中进化而来的，因此我们星球上的所有生命主要由水组成。当生命走出海洋时，在水有限的环境中生存就变得必不可少。在这种新的极端环境中生存下来的一种方法是，在等待水返回的同时，使自己变干或变干。这种方法存在于所有的生命王国。忍受干燥需要细胞、组织和有机体之间的协调，但这是如何发生的细节尚不清楚。水与生命界面研究所（WALII）生物整合研究所将利用具有低和高干燥耐受性的真菌、植物和动物来填补这些空白。该研究所的长期目标是了解生物体如何耐受干燥，发明在低水环境中工作的技术和概念，设计蛋白质，细胞和生物体以增加干燥耐受性，并建立一个全国性的干燥科学家社区。WALII的研究将通过寻找新的、基于干燥耐受性的作物损失预防策略、开发用于储存目前冷藏的药物的干燥储存解决方案以及缓解物种多样性的持续减少来影响社会。建立一个全国性的综合研究社区需要一支专业的、多学科的工作队伍，并与公众融合。为此，WALII培训计划将支持100多名来自不同背景的科学家在职业生涯的各个阶段的职业发展，其外展计划将邀请公众加入WALII的科学家进行干燥耐受性实验。生命科学中的概念和工具主要是在完全水合系统的背景下产生的。WALII将研究生命和水在不同生物中跨时间尺度和水合状态的相互作用，使用四个相互交织的主题：1)干燥耐受性的物理和分子决定因素；2)分子和细胞在脱水敏感性连续体中的再水化反应；3)内在无序蛋白在脱水耐受性中的作用；4)干旱耐受性的短期和长期进化历史。WALII的多尺度、跨学科的无水生物研究旨在点燃固态生物学的一个变革性新领域，首先关注生物分子、细胞、组织和生物体在干燥胁迫下的功能和功能障碍的建模。新的方法和途径将是必不可少的，包括更好的种子库保存和稳定植物有性生殖的方案，更好的防水材料和保水策略，以及敏感的体内工具来感知和操纵细胞对干燥的反应。WALII结合了来自几个学科的研究人员的专业知识，如生物物理学、细胞生物学、计算生物学、干燥耐受性、进化生物学、生态学、遗传学、植物、动物、种子、真菌和花粉生理学，以及各种组织，如非营利研究机构、大学、西班牙裔服务机构和主要本科机构。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。

Life on Earth evolved in the oceans and consequently all life on our planet is composed mostly of water. When life moved out of the ocean, surviving environments with limited water became a necessity. One approach to survive this new extreme, that is present across all kingdoms of life, is to dry out, or desiccate, while waiting for water to return. Tolerating desiccation requires coordination across cells, tissues, and organisms, but the details of how this happens are unknown. The Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII) Biology Integration Institute will fill in these gaps using fungi, plants, and animals with low and high desiccation tolerance. The long-term goals of this Institute are understanding how organisms tolerate desiccation, inventing technologies, and concepts for working in low-water environments, engineering proteins, cells, and organisms to increase desiccation tolerance, and building a national community of desiccation scientists. Research at WALII will impact society by finding new, desiccation-tolerance-based strategies for crop loss prevention, developing dry storage solutions for storing medicines currently stored cold, and mitigating ongoing decreases in species diversity. Establishing a national, integrated research community requires an expert, multidisciplinary workforce, and integration with the public. To that end, the WALII training programs will support career development for over 100 scientists from diverse backgrounds at all career stages, and its outreach initiatives will invite the public to join WALII’s scientists in desiccation tolerance experiments.Concepts and tools in life sciences have been made primarily in the context of fully hydrated systems. WALII will study the interaction of life and water across timescales and hydration states in diverse organisms, using four intertwined themes: 1) Physical and molecular determinants of desiccation tolerance; 2) Molecular and cellular rehydration responses across the continuum of desiccation sensitivity; 3) The role(s) of intrinsically disordered proteins in conferring desiccation tolerance; and 4) Short- and long-term evolutionary histories of desiccation tolerance. The multiscale, transdisciplinary studies of anhydrobiosis at WALII aim to ignite a transformative new field of solid-state biology, focused first on modeling function and dysfunction of biomolecules, cells, tissues, and organisms under desiccation stress. New methods and approaches will be essential, including better protocols for seedbank preservation and stabilizing plant sexual reproduction, better water-resistant materials and water-retention strategies, and sensitive in vivo tools for sensing and manipulating cellular responses to desiccation. WALII combines the expertise of researchers from several disciplines such as biophysics, cell biology, computational biology, desiccation tolerance, evolutionary biology, ecology, genetics, and plant, animal, seed, fungal, and pollen physiology and diverse organizations such as non-profit research institutes, universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Primarily Undergraduate Institutions.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.