The Molecular Ecologist

This year’s Harry Smith Prize, which recognizes the best paper published in the field of molecular ecology by an early career scholar, has been awarded to Robert Masaki Hechler, now a PhD student working with Martin Krkosek at the Univeristy of Toronto.

With collaborators at McGill University and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Hechler demonstrated the use of environmental RNA as an indicator of physiological responses to temperature stress in experimental microcosm communities, with Daphnia pulex as a focal species. The work appears in the paper “Environmental transcriptomics under heat stress: Can environmental RNA reveal changes in gene expression of aquatic organisms?”, which was published on the Molecular Ecology website last October.

In selecting Hechler’s study for the 20204 prize, the award committee of Jana Wold, Angel Rivera-Colon, and Arne Jacobs wrote

An accumulating body of studies had been published describing the use of environmental DNA to investigate species composition and distribution. However, the use of eRNA has been far less studied. Robert investigated gene expression changes in Daphnia exposed to heat-stress and control conditions in a common garden set up to show that eRNA collected from tanks shows similar patterns of gene expression changes compared to RNA extracted from Daphnia tissue. Therefore, this is the first paper, to our knowledge, to show that eRNA can be used to detect the molecular responses of macroorganisms to environmental stress, opening up a wide potential for further studies.

The winning article is available Open Access at the Molecular Ecology website.

The award committee also recognized an “outstanding paper” as runner-up: Aurora García-Berro’s demonstration that migratory butterfly species maintain greater genome-wide genetic diversity.

The editorial board of the journal Molecular Ecology is seeking nominations for the Harry Smith Prize, which recognizes the best paper published in Molecular Ecology or Molecular Ecology Resources in the previous calendar year (2023) by graduate students or early career scholars with no more than five years of postdoctoral or fellowship experience. The prize comes with a cash award of US$1000 and an announcement in the journal and in The Molecular Ecologist.  The winner will also be asked to join a junior editorial board for the journal to offer advice on changing research needs and potentially serve as a guest editor. The winner of this annual prize is selected by the junior editorial board.

The prize is named after Professor Harry Smith FRS, who founded Molecular Ecology and served as both Chief and Managing Editor during the journal’s critical early years. He continued as the journal’s Managing Editor until 2008, and he went out of his way to encourage early career scholars. In addition to his editorial work, Harry was one of the world’s foremost researchers in photomorphogenesis, where he determined how plants respond to shading, leading to concepts such as “neighbour detection” and “shade avoidance,” which are fundamental to understanding plant responses to crowding and competition. More broadly his research provided an early example of how molecular data could inform ecology, and in 2008 he was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize that recognized both his scientific and editorial contributions to the field.

Please send a PDF of the paper you are nominating, with a short supporting statement (no more than 250 words; longer submissions will not be accepted) directly to molecol.social@gmail.com by Friday 26 April 2024. Self-nominations are encouraged.