URI biologist receives $2.5M grant for tree of life study

SOUTH KINGSTOWN – A University of Rhode Island biologist received a $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant to study the genetics of three groups of parasites and single-celled organisms to help scientists build a tree of life of Earth’s living organisms.

Christopher Lane, associate professor of biological sciences, received the grant, which is part of NSF’s genealogy of life program, for the five-year research project that will result in approximately 250 draft genomes, thousands of new DNA barcodes and images of organisms that will be put in online databases for scientist use.

“There are lots of areas of the tree of life that we know very little about,” Lane said in a statement. “We don’t know a lot about what’s at the base of the tree of life, for instance, and what major groups belong together. To figure that out, we’ve got to collect more data from areas of the tree that we don’t understand well.”

Lane, his students and colleagues at the University of Maryland and Smith College will focus their work on the stramenopiles, which include diatoms, brown algae and water molds; the rhizaria, single-celled marine and aquatic organisms that serve as decomposers and predators on the micro scale; and the alveolata, a group of more than 6,000 single-celled parasites, ciliates and dinoflagellates.

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“These three groups are responsible for an enormous amount of ecosystem functioning that we don’t appreciate or fully recognize,” Lane said. “Many are having huge impacts on food webs, both marine and terrestrial, and we know very little about what they do and who they are. Our job will be to get a whole bunch of genetic information from these organisms to place them in the tree of life and understand their role in the ecosystem.”

Organisms in existing databases will be examined by researchers, who also will collect new samples from freshwater, saltwater and terrestrial sites from habitats around the world. A short region of DNA from each member of the organisms they are targeting will then be sequenced, according to information from the university.

“We’re trying to understand our living world and the evolution of organisms through time,” he said. “But there have been some significant changes in the past 15 years that completely change how we understand the evolution of some traits.

“And major groups of organisms we never knew existed have just shown up on our radar,” he added. “We know them by their genetic signature, but we don’t know what they look like or what they consume or how they make a living. So part of this project is trying to flesh out that information.”

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