Over a decade after the first African American scientist received a PhD in Evolutionary Biology (broadly defined) only five others would do the same. (Left to Right) Dr. Joseph L. Graves Jr. in 1988 from Wayne State University, Dr. Scott Edwards in 1992 from the University of California-Berkeley, Dr. Tyrone Hays in 1993 from Harvard University, Dr. Colette St Mary in 1994 from the University of California-Santa Barbara, Dr. Paul Turner in 1995 from Michigan State University, and Dr. Charles Richardson (not pictured) in 1999 from Indiana University.
Update, 11 June 2020:This post has been edited to clarify attributions.
I remember the first day I met a Black faculty member in evolutionary biology. I had just finished my first year of graduate school and was attending the Workshop in Molecular Evolution at Woods Hole biological station. Dr. Scott Edwards, noted ornithologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, was one of our lecturers for the week. Let me tell you; I had never googled someone faster than when I realized he’d be presenting the lecture on phylogeography. Only a few years out from receiving my B.S. in Botany, I found myself thinking, “I could do birds, birds are cool!” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of amazing mentors who helped foster my interest and practice of science, and by then had shaken off most of the new-grad-student-smell of indecision. At that moment, though, I was struck. Representation, being able to see yourself in someone else and imagine a possible future, has the power to alter the trajectory of any one person’s life. I enjoyed Dr. Edwards’ lecture and got to have a great conversation with him over the workshop’s celebratory lobster dinner. Still, I ultimately decided I was too much of a plant fanatic to jump ship just then.
Pangolins are
bizarre creatures that do not seem to attract a lot of attention, but when they
do, they hit the headlines big time. And usually not in a very positive way. After
being labeled “the most trafficked mammal you’ve
never heard of”,
pangolin’s unfortunate reputation has been recently reinforced by the news
suggesting that pangolins might be involved in the coronavirus outbreak as an intermediate host.
Since this finding was announced in the form of a press release, let’s not jump to conclusions and let’s wait for the publication that comes out of the peer-review. Nevertheless, this Saturday, February 15, is World Pangolin Day, and thus, it is a good time to do some PR for these fascinating animals.
At the end of January, the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) journal put out a list: “Readers’ Choice: The best of The ISME Journal 2019” . I don’t know about you (my fellow scientists also with 35+ chrome tabs open to papers to read), but I often feel behind on reading and worry I missed something during the week’s madness. I am also a list person, so this caught my eye and reminded me of a paper from December about two of my favorite things: microbes and whales.
Acmispon strigosus, the Californian wild legume at the center of the study. (CalPhotos: Wynn Anderson)
Mutually beneficial interactions between species provide key services and resources for most ecological communities. Maintaining traits that benefit a separate, unrelated species requires a potentially delicate balance of costs and benefits, but most species that host mutualists are equipped to prevent them from taking advantage of the interaction. That doesn’t mean that mutualists never walk away from mutualism — as seen in a new study of the bacteria that fix nitrogen for one native California wildflower, mutualists may go their own way pretty frequently.
The diversity of form and physiology within Viridiplantae. ( One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative 2019, Figure 1)
What is the weight of a transcriptome? How about a thousand? Every day new sequencing machines are purring away, base pair by base pair, producing novel insights into the genomes of our favorite organisms. As technology improves, costs come down, and opportunities for “Big data” to have an impact on the most non-model of non-model species occur more often. Soon, even the darkest corners of the Eukaryotic branch of life, thought left only to the most artisanal of biological research, will benefit from proximity to annotated genomic data. Towards the end of 2019, the One Thousand Plant Transcriptome Initiative (1KP), a consortium of almost 200 researchers from around the world, released their capstone paper in the Journal Nature. In that paper, they detail the summary analyses of transcriptome data from 1,124 species across Archaeplastida (Green Plants, Glaucophytes, and Red Algae), spanning over a billion years of evolutionary time
In biology,
there are many ways to solve evolutionary ‘challenges’ so it always amazes me
when organisms solve them in similar ways. And I love a good paper that adds to
our attempts to dissect multi-trait adaptations. Recently, Schweizer et al.
2019 examined the genetic and physiological basis of high altitude adaptation in
North American deer mice (Peromyscusmaniculatus) by combining
population genetics with physiological experiments.
The authors genotyped highland (Mt. Evans, CO – 4350 meters above sea level) and lowland (Lincoln, NE – 430 meters above sea level) mice and identified SNPs that exhibit extreme allele frequency changes in the highland population. Among the top SNPs were several in EPAS1, a gene that encodes the O2-sensitive subunit of hypoxia inducible factor 2 (HIF-2). HIF-2 is one of a critical family of transcription factors that are responsible for ensuring that O2 supply matches O2 demand, and transcription factors are exactly where you might expect to find the genetic basis of multi-trait adaptations, because they regulate the expression of many genes and potentially many traits. Thus, changes in the expression or binding capacity of a transcription factor can simultaneously affect many phenotypes. Sampling across a wide range of deer mice populations in the Southwest (see figure below) showed an EPAS1 allelic frequency distribution that positively correlates with altitude distribution.
A green immigrant leaf weevil, Polydrusus sericeus, one of tens of thousands of species in the family Curculionidae (Flickr, Dann Thrombs)
Beetles have long had a special place, if not in the heart of the Creator, in the imaginations of evolutionary biologists. They’re widely considered the most diverse single clade of animals, something upwards of 400,000 species that share a common ancestor — when the explosive diversification of that ancient lineage began, how it proceeded, and what caused it have been the subject of a lot of research. Many of those questions are addressed in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, which uses an unprecedented genomic dataset to figure out when beetles began their epic diversification, and tests one major hypothesis for the reason behind that diversification.
A great blue heron keeps watch over the dunes of Asilomar State Beach.
Even-numbered years are distinguished by Olympic Games (summer or winter), U.S. Congressional elections, and the American Society of Naturalists biennial meeting at Asilomar, a retreat center embedded in a California state park near the northern tip of the Monterey Peninsula. AmNat2020, which took place over the first weekend of the decade, featured the full range of biological research represented by the American Society of Naturalists and the U.S. scientific journal with the longest continuous publication history, but genetic and genomic data were key to many of the meeting’s highlights.
Current Position, Institution, & Department: Postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Anthropology & Biology at Pennsylvania State University
Contact information (if you want people to be able to reach you): kathleen.e.grogan@gmail.com
What is your elevator pitch? AKA what do you do/study?
My research uses human and non-human primates to ask how genetic and epigenetic variation impacts inter-individual differences in fitness across environmental conditions. With the effects of human-induced climate change becoming more pronounced, understanding the interplay of the environment, evolutionary genomics, and individual fitness is critical to our ability to conserve biodiversity and understand humanity’s ability to adapt to climate change.
What is your background & When/how did you know you wanted to get into the world of scientific research?
I decided I wanted to study animals at the age of 8 after giving up on being an Olympic figure skater. I grew up in Kentucky surrounded by animals of all kinds (e.g., dogs, lizards, turtles, snakes, birds, fish, etc), watching tv shows about elephants and wolves on the Discovery Channel, and they fascinated me. As I got older, I focused more on becoming a scientist who studied animals. During my undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt, I started doing research in a molecular ecology lab and fell in love with genetics. Since then, I’ve been refining the questions I’m interested in and adding humans to the list of organisms I’ve studied. That list now includes aphids, marmots, howler monkeys, ring-tailed lemurs, white-throated sparrows, and humans!
What is the funniest or most memorable thing that has happened to you while working in science?
I once walked around Toliara, Madagascar with a stranger’s poop on the back of my pant calf for 24 hours without realizing it. I had to fly to South Africa with it still on my pants.
What do you do when you’re not working?
Walk or run with my dog. Read voraciously. Hike. Be with friends. Watch Kentucky basketball with my dad. Drink cider or cocktails.
What are your hopes for 2020?
Get a faculty job & a second dog. Submit my ‘leftover’ papers from my PhD and first postdoc (N=3) and run >350 miles.
Name: R. Shawn Abrahams (They/Them)
Current Position, Institution, & Department: PhD Candidate in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Contact information (if you want people to be able to reach you): R.Shawnabrahams@gmail.com
What is your elevator pitch? AKA what do you do/study?
I study the the evolution of plant metabolism. My dissertation research focuses on the specialized metabolites called glucosinolates (Mustard oils) and how they have become such a diverse and complex group of defense metabolites. To that end, I utilize insights from comparative genomics, phylogenomics, and plant-insect interactions. Did I mention polyploidy? That’s in there too.
What is something that fascinates you from another field?
Physics and astrophysics have recently caught my interest. Specifically when it comes to time, relativity, quantum theory, and how that relates to biology. For example there is a great interview with the physicist Carlo Rovelli on one of my favorite podcasts “On Being”, where he describes everything in existence as interactions, or “happenings”, at different time scales as opposed to static things. Both a dirt clog and a stone of the same size are collections of sediment and rock, but one will be gone in a day and the other may last hundreds of years. A kiss is a happening made up of all of the same things the individuals kissing are, but it only last for a moment. Whereas the happening of a person, that is to say the cells and molecules that make up an individual, can go on for a lifetime. Physics is a broad field, but understanding it can change how we perceive our world.
Top 3 favorite organisms?
Not counting any humans: 1) My cat Zsa Zsa (Below, she’ a feisty Cornish Rex) 2) The Zilla macroptera that I planted my first year of grad school and that finally flowered after 4 years of growth. 3) The Putranjiva roxburghii that sat in the back of our greenhouse for those same 4 years until I only recently realized it was there! It represents a convergent evolution of mustard oils outside of the Brassicaceae (Mustard family). Basically, it is a tree where the leaves taste like radishes.
When/how did you know you wanted to get into the world of science research?
As a kid I loved plants, they surprised me. Specifically, while watching the Private Life of Plants with David Attenborough, there is a time lapse scene of a bramble crawling across the forest floor. I knew plants were alive as a fact, but I hadn’t internalized it until that moment. I was hooked. I had heard the word botanist somewhere and decided that would be my career. At the same time other kids my age wanted to be sensible things like astronauts so my parents were a little confused. They suggested I become a doctor and have a garden instead, little did they know I could be both! It wasn’t until high school where I was entered into a magnet program for environmental science and Everglades restoration, that I really started to take the idea of scientific research seriously. One of my teachers had her masters in plant biology and mentored me. I was our student herbarium curator for the school’s Everglades flora collection and I participated in several science projects associated with Fairchild Tropical gardens, in Miami Fl. It’s hard to believe that I would be doing what I’m doing today without that experience.
What was the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome?
My first fall semester of graduate school was particularly rough. It had all of the normal characters you might expect: imposter syndrome, anxiety, loneliness. But that semester my campus had also made national news for protests headed by black students of the “Concerned Students 1950” organization and the Mizzou football team. Racist acts on campuses in the US are common enough that I had experienced my fair share by then, either directly or indirectly. This was different. A lack of sufficient action on the part of the administration to racially charged events (A swastika displayed on a campus dorm, harassment of the campus’s first black student body president) led to wide spread protests. The events on campus became tangled up in emotions from the then recent murder of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager shot by police not two hours away in a neighborhood that was similar if not the same as many undergraduate students attending the University.
As these kinds of things are, it wasn’t neat. Some members of the campus were in open support of the protests demanding action, others actively upset. I remember one graduate student going on a rant about how the protests were damaging their degree and that the students should be forced to stop. The worst of it, for me, came with a shooting threat posted to social media, saying that they would “shoot every black person [they saw]”. It was easy to not show up on campus that day, but there was at least one professor who refused to cancel their exam suggesting that students should stand up to the “bullies” that made the shooting threat. Even just recalling it all now feels like a fever dream. It probably says a lot that I haven’t mentioned yet the university administration abruptly canceling graduate student health insurance at the start of that semester, days before renewal. They used a change in IRS federal policy to justify the action, but have since reevaluated with protest pressure and a lawsuit by the graduate student union.
My friends and family worried for me, and I worried that I had made the wrong decision going to graduate school. What good would my study of evolution be for people around me suffering? If I was smart and capable surely I should be doing something more than indulging my interests in the mysteries of life. I don’t think I so much overcame that semester as much as survived it. In the end, I decided to stay the course. I decided I needed to be here, in science, particularly for times like those, for students who would have to go through what I had to go through.
Phase-contrast image of Chlorella algal cells. (Wikimedia)
Coevolution between hosts and symbionts is fundamentally asymmetric. Symbiotic mutualists or parasites can adapt to their hosts faster than hosts can adapt in response because the symbionts usually have shorter generation times — and they also generally have the benefit of much larger population sizes, providing a bigger pool of potentially useful mutations and reduced influence of genetic drift. This latter advantage, though, can be lost to the ecological consequences of coevolution with hosts. If hosts evolve resistance to a parasite, the parasite population will collapse, until a new counter-resistance mutation emerges.
How this kind of ecological feedback affects the coevolution of hosts and symbionts is a challenging thing to track, but a paper published recently in Science Advances manages to do it with a genomics-enabled experimental model of host-parasite coevolution. Tracking the population sizes and genomic diversity of the unicellular alga Chlorella variabilis and a DNA virus that attacks it, the authors identify how host and parasite population dynamics shape host-parasite coevolution.
