Miriam E. Zolan - US grants

ABSTRACT Yves V. Brun DBI# 9987835

In the last two years, with funding from Indiana University-Bloomington, the members of the MBG Program have introduced 20 undergraduate students, mostly from small colleges, to the fascinating world of scientff ic research by allowing them to participate in research at the frontiers of molecular biology and genetics. An REU Site Grant will allow the to continuation of a very successful Undergraduate Research Program to benefit students mainly from groups traditionally underrepresented in research and students from regional undergraduate institutions. Ten students will conduct research in laboratories that use molecular biology and genetic techniques to study problems including the regulation of gene expression, the mechanisms of cell differentiation and development, host-parasite interaction and disease resistance in plants, gene evolution, signal transduction, DNA repair, and virus infection and replication.
This program is designed to develop both the technical and the intellectual abilities of the participants. The philosophy is that one learns how to do research by doing it but that this only occurs under the appropriate guidance. The program will emphasize the "doing R" aspect of research by involving the students in a research project under close supervision. Students will learn about the different stages and aspects of scientific investigation by interaction with their mentors and in sessions on scientific writing and research ethics. Students will also be exposed to the research conducted in the other host laboratories during weekly lunchtime seminars given by faculty mentors.

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.

In the last 3 years, with funding from NSF, the members of the our Program have introduced 30 undergraduate students, mostly from small colleges, to the fascinating world of scientific research by allowing them to participate in research at the frontiers of molecular biology and genetics. We are able to continue this successful Undergraduate Research Program to benefit students mainly from groups traditionally under-represented in research and students from regional undergraduate institutions. Ten students will conduct research in laboratories that use molecular biology and genetic techniques to study problems including the regulation of gene expression, the mechanisms of cell differentiation and development, host-parasite interaction and disease resistance in plants, gene evolution, signal transduction, DNA repair, and virus infection and replication. This program is designed to develop both the technical and the intellectual abilities of the participants. Our philosophy is that one learns how to do research by doing it but that this only occurs under the appropriate guidance. We will emphasize the "doing it" aspect of research by involving the students in a research project under close supervision. Students will learn about the different stages and aspects of scientific investigation by interaction with their mentors and in sessions on scientific writing and research ethics. Students will also be exposed to the research conducted in the other host laboratories during weekly lunchtime seminars given by faculty mentors.

The Indiana University REU Site program was established in 1998 and has been funded by NSF since 2000. Ten undergraduate students per year come to the Bloomington campus to participate in research at the frontiers of molecular biology and genetics. Applications from all students are considered, especially those from minority groups traditionally under-represented in science and those from institutions with limited research opportunities. Students conduct research in laboratories that use molecular biology and genetic techniques to investigate basic biological mechanisms, including the regulation of gene expression, the mechanisms of cell differentiation and development in plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria, host-parasite interaction and disease resistance in plants, molecular evolution, signal transduction, DNA repair, cellular mechanisms of mitosis and meiosis, protein structure, and virus infection and replication. This program is designed to develop both the technical and the intellectual abilities of the participants. Each student conducts a research project under close mentor supervision. Students also write research proposals and formal papers, present research talks at an end-of-program symposium, and participate in sessions on research ethics, graduate school, and other topics of interest. Students are also exposed to research conducted in a range of laboratories during weekly lunchtime seminars. More information is available at http://www.bio.indiana.edu/undergrad/opportunities/mbgreu/index.html, or by contacting the REU coordinator at iusummer@bio.indiana.edu.