Hey guys!I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the research my experience getting funding through a summer undergraduate research funding (SURF) award from the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) to do research at the U of I last summer with Dr.Heath and Dr.Marshall-Colon, and what I spent the summer doing.
To understand the work I was doing, you first have to know a little bit about the legume-rhizobium mutualism, and why we care about it. The legume-rhizobium mutualism is a huge part of the nitrogen cycle in natural and some agricultural systems. The partnership is initiated when a rhizobium cell (a soil living bacteria) infects the root of a legume, triggering a chain of molecular signaling steps that end with the legume forming a specialized structure on its root called a nodule. Once in the nodule, the rhizobium begins replicating and converting atmospheric nitrogen into a form that the plant can use ,which the plant can’t do on its own. In return, the plant supplies the rhizobia in the nodule with various sugars from photosynthesis and amino acids that the rhizobia could not produce on their own. It sounds like everything is hunky dory right? The plant gets nitrogen to use to grow, and the rhizobia gets all sorts of nutrients it needs to reproduce, everyone walks away happy every time! But that isn’t the whole story. In nature we find a wide range of rhizobia partner qualities between different strains, so while some rhizobia get along great with their plant hosts and provide a great service that helps the plant grow, other strains provide almost no nitrogen to their partners and take just as much sugar from the plant as the high quality rhizobia, hurting the plant more than they help. That variation is interesting to both evolutionary biology and to applied agricultural scientists. It’s interesting to evolutionary biologists because it seems like in natural systems, if bad partners can get just as much energy from their host to reproduce, and spend less of that energy producing useful nitrogen to the plant, they should be able to reproduce more than good partners and take over, wiping out high quality partners, but that’s not what we see in nature. This gets at what I think is one of the most interesting questions in biology, that is, how mutualisms remain stable in evolutionary time against bad partners who take advantage of the system. It’s interesting to agricultural scientists because nitrogen fertilizers have a huge monetary and environmental cost, if we can figure out why high quality rhizobia are good partners and low quality rhizobia are bad partners, we can use that to introduce high quality partner strains to agricultural systems and reduce, nitrogenous fertilizer usage. Last summer I had the pleasure of starting work on a project studying the mutualism between legumes and rhizobium. The goal of the work I spent the summer doing, and will be working on throughout my graduate studies here at UIUC, is to understand the molecular basis of partner quality variation between rhizobia strains. We’re specifically interested in connecting data on plant health (phenotypic data) with data on the genomes of both the rhizobia strains and legumes we are using, as well as gene expression data within nodule tissue, and metabolism data within nodules. The long term goal is to take all of the data we are collecting (there is a lot!) and eventually put it all together to be able to look at a rhizobium strain genome and say weather it will be a high or low quality partner, and why. With that information, we should be able to find specific regions of genetic diversity to target for further study, and test for different evolutionary forces. We will also be able to move towards designing an optimal rhizobium for applications in agricultural settings. As anyone who has done research knows, the grand plan style goals don’t happen in the first summer of work on a project, but last summer, and in the time since, we’ve made some really exciting progress. Over the summer we ran our first greenhouse experiment with two different rhizobia strains and two different lines of the model legume Medicago trucatula, and troubleshooted our methods of avoiding contamination between treatments, as well as our methods for metabolite extraction. We also have since gotten RNA sequencing data (gene expression data) from that project and are in the process of combining all of our data types, and coming up with a pipeline to process future projects. While two rhizobia strains, and two line of legume may not seem like a lot, it was critical to run a small experiment first to get our methods to a solid place, and based on what we learned this summer, we are currently harvesting our second experiment from the greenhouse, consisting of 2 legume lines, and 100 strains of rhizobia. My work last summer was important for the project I’m working on, and that’s of course important, but it was also really critical to my development as a biologist. I learned so many techniques this summer that each could have taken a whole semester to learn with constant stresses and interruptions from classes. I also got the opportunity to read more scientific literature in three months than I think I had in the whole year before, not to mention how much time I got one on one with graduate students and postdocs, which is of course harder to come by during the mad shuffle that is the academic year. To anyone looking at summer opportunities and wondering if they’re worth applying for, if you’re anywhere close to fitting the target audience for an award or position and you feel like it’s something that could help you grow as a biologist, go for it! The two things that I learned while applying for summer funding are that there are so many opportunities both on and off campus to make money over the summer doing independent science through awards available to undergraduates! There really is something to apply for for everyone and if you put in the time to write a good application, odds are great that something will be a good fit!. The other major take away was that the people around you want you to succeed and will do everything they can to help you achieve your goals if you reach out for help. With lots of writing help from the professors I work with, Dr.Marshall-Colon and Dr.Heath, I was able to earn awards from the school of integrative biology and a summer REU position from ASPB, none of which I would likely have qualified for had I submitted my original application without ample comments and editing help. If you’re interested in the ASPB SURF in future years, you can look for information on each years application and deadlines at https://aspb-surf.secure-platform.com/a/, feel free to contact me to ask about my application, or any questions you may have! I would like to thank Dr.Heath and Dr.Marshall-Colon for their constant help and guidance, as well as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of integrative biology, and the American Society of Plant Biologists for the funding that made my time on campus this summer possible, and finally Dr.Cheng, for allowing me to share my experience with all of you.
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