Researchers receive NERC grants pioneering environmental research

PI: Professor Sarah Reece 

The Earth’s daily rotation dictates the timing of activities for almost all organisms and is assumed to explain the evolution of circadian clocks and daily rhythms. However, the evolutionary ecology of rhythms is poorly understood, especially for parasites/pathogens, for whom the environments experienced inside hosts and vectors changes dramatically over 24 hours. 

Yet, rhythms play fundamental roles during infections; for example, the time-of-day an infection is acquired by organisms as diverse as insects and mammals can determine whether they survive or succumb.

PI: Dr Alex Twyford

Horizontal gene transfer (HGT)—the acquisition of genetic material from another organism without sexual reproduction—is recognised as being of great importance in prokaryote evolution, where it is responsible for the spread of antibiotic resistance genes among bacterial species. Its importance in eukaryote evolution has long been debated, with early studies erroneously inferring HGT because of contamination in reference genomes. 

Recent increases in the quality and quantity of reference genomes has led to well-supported examples of HGT of specific genes in particular species. However, the frequency and drivers of HGT, as well as the role that it plays in adaptation, remain unknown.  This project addresses the extent and importance of HGT in eukaryotes using large-scale comparative analyses of flowering plants. 

PI: Dr Susan Johnston

Dr Jonhston's NERC project is investigating why the rate and distribution of meiotic crossovers varies between females and males in a long-term study of wild house sparrows, in Helgeland in Norway. The population has been studied in 1993 with information collected on more than 38,000 birds

It will incorporate whole genome sequencing and new single-cell technologies to understand the function and evolution of the crossover process.  It has implications for evolutionary biology, fertility research, and animal and plant breeding.

PI: Dr Sandy Hetherington

The colonisation of land by plants transformed the Earth; they weathered bedrock, developed the first soils, changed river systems and locked up huge reserves of carbon as biomass. The radiation (spread) of plants is predicted to have caused global cooling, changes in atmospheric CO2 and O2 levels and a mass extinction event. 

However, linking specific events in plant evolution to these changes, on a causal basis, has proved to be difficult and contentious.  This means that our understanding and estimation of the impacts of plant colonisation on the Earth is still unclear. The primary objective of this work is to address this major unresolved question in the natural sciences.