| NSF Org: |
DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 17, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 17, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1523880 |
| Award Instrument: | Fellowship Award |
| Program Manager: |
Amanda Simcox
asimcox@nsf.gov (703)292-8165 DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | September 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $230,696.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $230,696.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
Elk Grove CA US 95624-2003 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
St. Louis MO US 63121-4499 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | IRFP-Inter Res Fellowship Prog |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2015, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Laura Lagomarsino is "Disentangling the abiotic and biotic drivers of rapid plant evolution in the Andean biodiversity hotspot." The host institutions for this fellowship are the University of Missouri, St. Louis and the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and the sponsoring scientists are Nathan Muchhala and Alexandre Antonelli. This fellowship is funded jointly with the Office of International Science and Engineering. Forming international collaborations is not only beneficial to the young scientist who conducts research at the foreign location, but is also in the U.S. national interest because that experience in a world-class research organization exposes the next generation of science leaders to the best the host country has to offer in terms of state-of-the-art research and the promises of continuing collaborations that will continue to strengthen U.S. science in the future.
The Andean mountain chains of South America are home to exceptionally high levels of biodiversity, including one-sixth of all plant species. The 550 species of Neotropical bellflowers in the genera Centropogon, Burmeistera, and Siphocampylus represent just a small fraction of this diversity, but are one of the single largest Andean radiations. Hummingbirds and bats pollinate these species, which comprise a colorful and conspicuous element of the cloud forest flora. The herbarium collections at the Missouri Botanical Garden and the University of Gothenburg are being used to disentangle the relative roles that recent, dramatic mountain building and shifts between bat and bird pollinators have played in generating the outstanding diversity of Neotropical bellflowers. First it is necessary to infer a robust phylogeny, or pattern of evolutionary relationships. The specific method utilized (Hyb-Seq) is effective even when DNA quality and concentration are low, allowing herbarium specimens to be the primary source of genetic information. The extent to which geology has impacted diversification in the Neotropical bellflowers is then being investigated using models of Andean uplift, ecological niche modeling, and phylogenetic dating methods; these results are validated by fossil pollen core data. Finally, macro- and microevolutionary implications of pollinator shifts are being investigated using methods from comparative phylogenetics, pollination ecology, and population genetics. The microevolutionary component of the study couples extensive diurnal and nocturnal pollination observations with the quantification of gene flow in a putative case of sympatric speciation mediated by a shift from bat to hummingbird pollination.
As the research is broadly interdisciplinary, training goals are to integrate techniques and viewpoints from phylogenetics, geology, pollination ecology, and population genetics. The Fellow is developing an educational module on vertebrate pollination suitable for K-12 students to be implemented as part of Missouri Botanical Garden's summer programming geared toward families. Additionally, the Fellow is developing and maintaining a website that makes high-resolution digital images of living and herbarium specimens of Neotropical bellflowers available to both the general public and researchers with specific interest in the group; this will be in addition to maintaining the Campanulaceae Working Group website. This Fellowship involves collaboration of researchers based in the US, Europe, and Latin America.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
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This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The tropical Andes are the world’s most species-rich biodiversity hotspot. This includes almost one-sixth of all known flowering plant species, many of which are endemic. The major goal of this project was to understand how this diversity originated using the Neotropical bellflowers (Lobelioideae: Campanulacee) as a model system. Our results show that the geography of the Andean mountains is important in species origination in this lineage, but that morphological evolution is likely driven by adaptation to different pollinator regimes.
The funded research targeted multiple scales. At the broadest scale, I inferred an improved phylogeny of this lineage with genome-scale data. Towards this end, I was part of a team that developed a toolbox of genomic resources in Neotropical bellflowers that will be useful for research outside of the funded project. This allowed the use of hundreds of genes in phylogenetic inference, resulting in the incorporation of evolutionary models that allow for population and species-level discordance (e.g., incomplete lineage sorting and introgression). While our results are broadly consistent with previous results from much smaller datasets, we find that our inferences improve significantly with these more complex models— exactly as is expected in a young evolutionary radiation. Our phylogeny is one of the first to resolve relationships at the species-level in an Andean plant radiation using hundreds genomic loci. Furthermore, a reliance on herbarium specimens as the primary source of DNA allowed me to include a representative sampling of Neotropical bellflowers without costly fieldwork, including species from difficult to access parts of the world (e.g., Venezuela) that were previously not included in an analysis of this clade.
At the narrowest scale, I examined ecological consequences of floral traits that determine pollination efficacy of three co-occurring species of Centropogon whose floral morphologies suggest they are either hummingbird or bat pollinated. This study, the culmination of hundreds of hours of fieldwork in the difficult to access, understudied cloud forests of Bolivia, demonstrated a generalization gradient, from primarily bat pollination in the white-flowered C. incanus to equal reliance on bats and hummingbirds in the red-flowered C. mandonis. Morphological measurements from herbarium specimens demonstrated differences in stamen exsertion between species that are accentuated in regions of sympatry, a pattern consistent with reproductive character displacement.
To bridge these two scales, we inferred the phylogeography of the peruvianid subclade of Neotropical bellflowers, including the species of Centropogon in which we demonstrated differential efficacy of bats and hummingbird pollinators. Herbarium specimens were used to capture the entire range of each species. These results suggest that species relationships, as well as population structure within the studied species, is largely driven by geography, consistent with the role of allopatry in species origination. Somewhat surprisingly, despite the fact that Bolivian Centropogon share pollinators in sympatry, they are monophyletic species that do not appear to be experiencing present day gene flow.
This project was a collaboration between US, European, and Latin American biologists, and included the training and support for multiple Bolivian students in fieldwork. Herbarium collections were fundamental to the success of this project, and research both generated dozens of new specimens of Bolivian Centropogon (in collaboration with the National Herbarium of Bolivia in la Paz), as well as the use and annotation of hundreds of specimens from the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Last Modified: 10/04/2018
Modified by: Laura P Lagomarsino
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