NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2022: Quantifying the microbiome's contribution to host acclimation and evolution under stress

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2022, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Global environmental change is occurring at such a rapid pace that organisms are struggling to adapt to it. However, forecasts of species responses to change have left out potentially pivotal players: the microbes that live with organisms, called host-associated microbes. Soil microbes often benefit plants in new environments, but this benefit may ultimately reduce plants’ ability to evolve in response to these environments. This project investigates the relative strength of these opposing forces. That is, to understand whether microbes ultimately help or hinder plants in their responses to global change. The fellow will also conduct a case study as a mentor to local community college students. The case study focuses on drought stress on a common, native plant in New Mexico, the most water-stressed state in the US. Understanding the drivers and outcomes of host-associate microbes will yield more accurate predictions of species’ responses to global change. This project uses field experiments, metagenomic analyses, and population modeling to investigate the most important microbial, ecological, and evolutionary drivers of microbe-mediated host stress responses, and to scale these up to predict host population responses to future conditions. First, a field experiment will manipulate the presence/absence of microbes to quantify their relative influence on plant acclimation (e.g. buffering, plasticity) and adaptation (e.g. natural selection, opportunity for selection) to drought stress. Then, meta-genomic and -transcriptomic data will identify microbial properties that may underlie these effects. Finally, microbial effects on individuals will be scaled up to population growth using integral projection models that forecast how microbes will influence host persistence under future stress scenarios. The fellow will create a paid summer research program that brings local community college students to the University of New Mexico (UNM) campus to participate in this research, and to design and conduct independent research under the mentorship of the fellow and UNM graduate students. Altogether this project will expand the fellow’s range of experimental, computational, and modeling approaches for a future research faculty position, and construct a novel, general framework for innovative research on the evolutionary ecology of host-microbiome interactions to anchor a future research program.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.