BRISTOL, R.I. – Roger Williams University’s Marcia Marston and Koty Sharp are joining a research team from four universities that has received a $3 million grant to probe how viruses impact microbes critical to our lives, from producing oxygen to growing food.
K. Eric Wommack, deputy dean in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Delaware, will lead the team of marine scientists, which includes researchers from Roger Williams, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Hawaii-Manoa.
The four-year project was announced by the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) on August 2. This collaboration is among eight projects across the U.S., totaling $41.7 million, that aim to build U.S. research capacity in understanding the relationship in organisms between their genes and their physical characteristics. Uncovering this genotype-to-phenotype relationship holds potential for improved crop yields, better prediction of human disease risk, and new drug therapies.
“Over the past several decades, scientists and engineers have made massive strides in decoding, amassing and storing genomic data,” said Denise Barnes, NSF EPSCoR head. “But understanding how genomics influence phenotype remains one of the more profound challenges in science. These awards lay the groundwork for closing some of the biggest gaps in biological knowledge and developing interdisciplinary teams needed to address the challenges.”
From water and soil to the human gut, you’ll find single-celled microbes – and viruses right alongside them. A virus will infect a microbe, hijack its machinery and begin replicating, eventually killing the host. But how these processes work within complex microbial communities is still largely a mystery.
RWU’s Marston and Sharp, along with their collaborators in Delaware, Nebraska and Hawaii, will focus research on viruses that infect phytoplankton – microscopic organisms that live in the salty ocean to freshwater lakes and conduct photosynthesis. Each researcher on the multi-institution team will examine a marine or aquatic virus that infects a different type of phytoplankton and from all types of bodies of water.
Drawing upon her 20-year collection of marine viruses sampled from Narragansett Bay, Marston’s research will analyze the genetic connection between marine viruses from local waters and their cyanobacteria hosts, called Synechococcus. Meanwhile, Sharp will train a spotlight on how viruses influence Astrangia poculata, a temperate species also known as Northern Star Coral that inhabit waters from Florida to Massachusetts.
