Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

My laboratory is interested in understanding the evolutionary processes that have led to the incredible diversity of life on earth, and that continue to generate diversity today. Under this proposal, we will investigate whether alternative evolutionary pathways are available to different genetic types, both within and between species. Our research does not qualify as Indigenous research. In order to investigate evolutionary processes, we study bacteria in the lab and in nature. Many bacteria are easy to grow in the lab and grow very quickly with several generations per day. This means that we can study evolution in near real-time. We can easily measure many different traits of bacteria in the lab, such as growth rates, resistance to stressors, and production of key enzymes. Moreover, it is relatively easy and cheap to sequence bacterial genomes, so we can understand the genetic basis of evolutionary changes that we observe. A fundamental question in evolutionary biology is whether different genetic types, such as different species, use the same or different mechanisms to adapt to the same stress. We will address this question by evolving bacteria at different levels of relatedness under identical laboratory conditions. By measuring various traits, as well as sequencing the genomes of evolved populations, we can determine whether they have adapted in similar ways. In addition, we will use both experiments and genome comparisons to ask whether all mutations - not just those that are adaptive - have similar effects for different genetic types. Our proposed research addresses questions of fundamental importance to evolutionary biology. Our work is most directly relevant to questions about repeatability and predictability in evolution: to the degree that genetic types respond differently to the same environment, we should expect to see divergent evolutionary trajectories amongst different lineages. Beyond fundamental evolutionary biology, our work has implications for the evolution and treatment of infectious disease. For example, differences in evolutionary outcomes for different types can impact antiviral resistance and vaccine escape in viruses, and can complicate public health efforts to combat antimicrobial resistance in bacteria. Thus, our work will have implications both for fundamental questions in evolutionary biology, and for wider applications.