NSF announces new awards for Understanding the Rules of Life
New projects address genetic, environmental causality in biological systems and processes
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced 29 awards in support of , one of the agency’s The awards, totaling $15 million, demonstrate NSF’s commitment to address some of the greatest challenges in understanding the living world, in all of its complex levels of organization, from the molecular scale through to the biosphere.
"These awards get to the heart of fundamental questions about biological processes that span multiple levels of organization," said Joanne Tornow, acting assistant director for NSF's Directorate for Biological Sciences. "We expect the science coming out of these awards to reveal new 'rules of life' that will contribute to a predictive understanding of living systems."
To better identify the "rules" for how life functions, researchers will develop better and newer research tools and infrastructure and establish a collaborative culture to train the next generation of researchers in cross-disciplinary scientific inquiry. NSF expects this research to establish certain "rules of life" that will enable forecasting or prediction of changes in biological systems.
Twenty of the newly awarded projects are funded through NSF's Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program and represent exploratory work in its early stages on untested but potentially transformative research ideas or approaches.
The other nine awards, funded through NSF’s program for Research Advanced by Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (RAISE), are bold, interdisciplinary projects whose scientific advances lie mostly outside the scope of a single discipline and appear to promise transformational advances.
As part of this same award solicitation, NSF also funded eight Understanding the Rules of Life-related workshops in 2018 aimed at complementing research in this field.
This year's Understanding the Rules of Life EAGER and RAISE awards are as follows:
- EAGER-Exploring the adaptive possibilities of 'redundancy' in a plant defense hormone signaling pathway, Eric Klavins,
- EAGER-Emergent functions of secreted microbial effectors, Jean Greenberg,
- EAGER-A predictive framework of metabolism as an engine of functional environmental responses across levels of biological organization, Kristi Montooth,
- EAGER-Genomics of exceptions to scaling of longevity to body size, Liliana M. Davalos,
- EAGER-Landscape phenomics: Predicting vulnerability to climate variation by linking environmental heterogeneity to genetic and phenotypic variation, W. Chris Funk,
- EAGER-Mining for ancient toolkits: Emergence of planar structures across kingdoms, Aleksandar Popadic,
- EAGER-The genetic architecture of biomechanical integration in fishes, Timothy Higham,
- EAGER-Disease resistance as a product of synergy between host immunity and the microbiome, Britt Koskella,
- EAGER-Genetic constraints on the increase of organismal complexity over time, James Schnable,
- EAGER-Rules of lifespan determination and buffering from lifelong spatiotemporal activity of key aging pathways, Adriana San Miguel,
- EAGER-Simple scaling rules that define how genome size constrains metabolism: A test among photosynthetic pathways, Kevin Simonin,
- EAGER-Environmental drivers of intraspecific variation in animal behavior and consequences for ecosystem functions, Lindsey Reisinger,
- EAGER-Determining the Interplay of Long- and Short-Range Interactions in Emergent Biological Collective Behavior, Allyson Sgro,
- EAGER-Design Rules for Multidomain Proteins Across the Tree of Life, Marie Dannie Durand,
- EAGER-Connecting RNA Molecular Kinetics to Developmental Regulation, Leslie Sieburth,
- EAGER-Metabolic asymmetry: An energetic rule for linking biology across scales, Anthony Dell,
- EAGER-Exceptions that Test the Rules - Establishing the Feasibility of Avian Feather Muscles as a Study System for Neuromotor Control, Tobin Hieronymus, ; and Bret Tobalske,
- EAGER-Rules for cellular adaptation to the mechanical properties of their environment, Tanmay Lele,
- EAGER-Linking physiology, morphology, and genomics to investigate adaption to rapid environmental change, Rachael A. Bay,
- RAISE-Design principles of evolved transportation networks in leaf veins, Benjamin Blonder,
- RAISE-Balancing demands of minimal cell, Zaida Luthey-Schulten,
- RAISE: Does everyone's microbiome follow the same rules?, Elizabeth Archie,
- RAISE-Building and modeling synthetic bacterial cells, John Glass,
- RAISE-Watershed rules of life, Peter Raymond,
- RAISE-Rules that govern seasonal migration of birds through the air, Jeffrey Kelly,
- RAISE-Specialization and decision making among synctial nuclei, Amy Gladfelter,
- RAISE-Principles of modular organization in resource-limited biological circuits, Domitilla Del Vecchio,
- RAISE-Integrating Statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics to understand emergent synchrony and phase transitions in biological systems, Alan Hastings,
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