Award Abstract #0328516
FIBR: Causes and Consequences of Recombination

NSF Org:	EF Emerging Frontiers
Initial Amendment Date:	August 27, 2003
Latest Amendment Date:	October 6, 2008
Award Number:	0328516
Award Instrument:	Continuing grant
Program Manager:	Parag R. Chitnis EF Emerging Frontiers BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences
Start Date:	September 1, 2003
Expires:	September 30, 2009 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$5000627
Investigator(s):	Michael Lynch milynch@indiana.edu (Principal Investigator) Miriam Zolan (Co-Principal Investigator) Curtis Lively (Co-Principal Investigator) Elizabeth Housworth (Co-Principal Investigator) Carla Caceres (Co-Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	Indiana University P O Box 1847 Bloomington, IN 47402 812/855-0516
NSF Program(s):	FRONTIERS IN BIO RES (FIBR)
Field Application(s):
Program Reference Code(s):	BIOT, 9183
Program Element Code(s):	7216

ABSTRACT

Intellectual Merit. This project is focused on one of biology's deepest mysteries - the evolutionary causes and consequences of recombination. The investigative team consists of cell biologists, ecologists, parasitologists, quantitative geneticists, genomicists, and mathematicians. The study organism, the planktonic microcrustacean Daphnia pulex, provides an exceptional array of opportunities for recombination research that is unavailable with any other system: a wide range of recombination intensities among natural populations, the presence of multiple sexual and asexual lineages, a powerful set of genomic tools, well understood ecology, ease of experimental manipulation, and a "living-fossil" record that can be resurrected from lake sediments. Specific goals include: 1) characterization of the genetic changes associated with the transition from meiotic to mitotic progeny production; 2) evaluation of whether the mutation rate (including the activity of mobile-genetic elements) is affected by meiosis; 3) a test of the hypothesis that mutation load accumulates in the absence of recombination; 4) evaluation of the extent to which recombination modifies the range of variation upon which natural selection acts; and 5) a test of the hypothesis that host-parasite evolution drives the evolution of recombination and sex. These studies will be informed by an integrated research program involving high-throughput sequencing, microarray analysis, and quantitative-genetic surveys. Guided by the empirical results, mathematical models will also be developed for understanding the evolutionary fates of genomic features of asexual organisms. Finally, the results of this study will be integrated into an emerging evolutionary framework suggesting that many aspects of the genomic architecture of multicellular organisms arose passively in response to mildly deleterious mutation accumulation in populations with small effective sizes.

Broader Impacts. The potential impacts of this project on science, society, and education are numerous. First, an undergraduate program will help instill an interdisciplinary philosophy while broadening career choices for students from multiple institutions, with a particular focus on minority recruitment. Second, the research program will be tightly integrated with the newly founded Daphnia Genomics Consortium, an international group of scientists from across the life sciences (http://daphnia.cgb.indiana.edu/). This will firmly establish D. pulex as a premier model system for studies in ecological and evolutionary genomics. Third, the research has significant applied implications in the areas of parasite-resistance evolution, clonal propagation, and genetic engineering.

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