NSF Award
1237267
Intellectual merit. Biological systems use memory of previous experiences to anticipate future environmental changes. In the literature this is called "anticipatory behavior". These experiments will be performed in Halobacterium salinarum, a tractable model organism that has adapted to a complex and dynamically changing natural environment. Individual environmental factors such as oxygen, temperature, pH do not occur in isolation but rather, in a temporally coupled and non-random manner. This project seeks to understand the rate at which microorganisms evolve novel anticipatory behavior as they encounter a new environment. This understanding will have significant implications on wide-ranging issues including predicting the consequences of climate change on microbial communities in the oceans, as well as strategies to prevent pathogens from evading the immune system.<br/><br/>Broader impacts. The objective is to significantly expand the already highly successful "Networks in Biology" high school educational module by incorporating statistical modeling and model inference lessons. It will be reinforced that models are as good as the data they are based upon, and model predictions must be assessed with rigorous statistics in order to avoid misinterpretation. These educational activities will be designed and implemented through collaborations between senior scientists, postdoctoral fellows, high school student interns from disadvantaged backgrounds, and educators, such as high school teachers and curriculum developers.
