| NSF Org: |
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 12, 2019 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 12, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1916632 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Carolyn J. Ferguson
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
| Start Date: | January 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $749,003.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $749,003.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
245 BARR AVE MISSISSIPPI STATE MS US 39762 (662)325-7404 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
PO Box 6156 Mississippi State MS US 39762-9662 |
| 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): | Systematics & Biodiversity Sci |
| 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
All living organisms require nitrogen to grow, but atmospheric nitrogen is not directly available to most species and must first be converted into a form suitable for use. Legumes, such as peas, lentils, and soybeans, and several other flowering plant groups can form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and house them in their roots in return for access to usable nitrogen. This symbiotic relationship is essential to ecosystem functioning and agricultural productivity. Despite the strong value in understanding this interaction, scientists have yet to unravel how this symbiosis evolved and its long-term evolutionary consequences for the global diversity of flowering plants. This project will close this gap by resolving the evolutionary relationships of 15,000 nitrogen-fixing species of flowering plants, analyzing the genes associated with their bacterial symbioses, and linking this new knowledge to a comprehensive database of species' habitat and morphological traits. Researchers will build scientific capacity through workshops on cutting-edge data science approaches in biology, targeting high school, undergraduate, and post-graduate levels. Outreach to the general public will increase awareness of the importance of organismal symbioses across the tree of life and how knowledge about these relationships can enhance food security and human well-being.
Researchers will evaluate the macroevolutionary consequences of angiosperms' symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria by testing four overarching hypotheses. Did bacterial symbiosis enable plant species to invade new, harsher soil environments low in nitrogen? If so, were other plant traits gained that allowed the plants to cope with these extreme habitats? Did the gain of bacterial symbioses allow these plant groups to evolve new species more rapidly than those without this relationship? Did global climate change over geologic time, including the spread of colder and drier habitats and falling atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, drive recent evolution of bacterial symbiosis? Researchers will use sequence data from ca. 230 nuclear loci to reconstruct a time-calibrated phylogenetic framework for the nitrogen-fixing clade of angiosperms and develop a suite of biodiversity informatics methods to generate species-distribution models and functional trait matrices at scale. Researchers will then analyze these data using comparative methods. Outcomes of the research will provide a rigorous understanding of the ecological and evolutionary factors that drove the gains and losses of this symbiosis through time and of how nodulation has itself impacted the diversification and global distribution of angiosperms. Methods developed by the project will facilitate future synthetic analyses utilizing rich, curated data resources across broad phylogenetic, spatial, and temporal scales.
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.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
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.
Nitrogen-fixing symbiosis, a relationship between plants and microbes to access nitrogen from the atmosphere, is inarguably essential to agriculture and natural ecosystems. This project had as its two related aims: (1) building models to reconstruct the history of symbiosis in terms of number of independent evolutionary origins and the environments under which symbiosis may have originated in Earth’s past, and (2) building models that describe environmental parameters in today’s climate, such as temperature and precipitation that maintain symbiosis in natural communities. Addressing these two aims is an essential step towards harnessing the potential of symbiosis in agriculture and land management as these tasks depend in part on evolutionary and environmental constraints that govern how plants and microbes work together.
The researchers integrated a phylogenetic framework linking nearly 15,000 species with similarly massive datasets comprising geographic distribution, environmental parameters, and trait information for thousands of species. This effort was focused on the nitrogen-fixing clade, the group of plants that contains all species engaging in nitrogen-fixing symbiosis in the form of a root nodule organ, such as that seen in legume crops, to achieve the aims. With these data resources in hand, the researchers investigated a series of research questions regarding the rate of origin of species as well as differences in form and habitat between species that engage in symbiosis or do not, as well as between different forms of the symbiosis with different bacterial partners. The researchers also mapped the symbiosis globally, identifying global hotspots of symbiosis. Results indicate the importance of a variety of environmental factors, centrally aridity, in promoting symbiosis, while identifying important differences among different symbiotic groups of plants and different areas of Earth, suggesting that different forms of symbiosis may be on separate evolutionary trajectories.
In the course of the work, a postdoc, numerous students, and members of the scientific community received training focused on Data Science. This training included formal professional development activities, workshops and symposia at international scientific meetings, international visiting research experiences, and an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program that trained 13 undergraduate students. Members of the public were engaged through production of a 3D video exposing non-specialists to how scientists implement phylogenetic information in the real world. The project also generated open access data resources and methodological advances.
Last Modified: 04/29/2025
Modified by: Ryan Andrew Folk
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