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

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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.