Research Initiation Awards: Tidal flow drives the viral community composition in the soil of intertidal zones

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Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The project seeks to understand the effect of viruses on the global systems and their impact on the environment.The overall goal of this project is to understand the diversity and potential of viruses within intertidal zones in the Chesapeake Bay area using direct counts, isolates of viruses and hosts (mycobacteria) and sequencing approaches. The expected outcomes will contribute to the gap of knowledge on the biodiversity of the viral community in the physical intersection of soil and marine environments with an emphasis on the intertidal zone of different river systems in the Chesapeake Bay Estuary. The experimental methods will incorporate an interdisciplinary approach combining field work, environmental sample collection, biology based wet-lab experimentation, data analysis, metagenomics, genomics and bioinformatics. The approach will be to isolate, annotate and analyze mycobacteriophage genomes and to understand the viral diversity of the intertidal zone in different seasons. The global impact of this work will contribute to the understanding of how anthropogenic factors may contribute to the changes in environmental ecosystems.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.