March 27, 2013
Steve Nadler at his microscope in his Hutchison Hall lab. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
DAVIS--Professor Steve Nadler of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, who studies the systematics and evolutionary biology of nematodes, has received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to “develop and implement a novel, efficient and reliable molecular-based approach for nematode-species discovery.”
Nadler, the principal investigator of the UC Davis-based project, and co-principal investigator James Baldwin of the UC Riverside Department of Nematology, received the $646,300 grant through the ARTS Program (Advancing Revisionary Taxonomy and Systematics) of the NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology.
The title of the project, to be funded beginning June 1, is “ARTS: Overcoming the Nematode Taxonomic Impediment through Integration of Novel Tools for Species Discovery and Phylogeny: Cephaloboidea as a Case-Study.” The primary study site is the Philip L. Boyd Deep Canyon Reserve Research Center, Palm Desert, a UC Reserve.
“Human existence depends on soil, soil organisms and their processes; these are basic to sustaining environmental systems, agriculture and human well-being,” Nadler said. “Microscopic nematodes are a key component to soil systems; they are unmatched in species diversity, often with thousands of individuals in a handful of soil. Surprisingly, most nematode species remain hidden to science, that is, undiscovered and unnamed; their species-specific environmental roles are generally not understood at a level useful to define, understand and sustain healthy ecosystems.”
“This project develops new DNA/microscopy technology to implement novel, efficient, cost-saving approaches to nematode species discovery and description, including evolutionary and ecological relationships,” Nadler said. “A California desert is the experimental site for developing these tools, but the application/benefits are global.”
More than 28,000 species of nematodes, or roundworms, of the estimated 1 million species throughout the world, have been described.
Nadler said that “dramatically improving nematode identification tools will support soil ecologists and other biologists in the broader goals of understanding biological diversity and soil ecosystems for the benefit of humanity.”
“Beyond species discovery, the project addresses another serious shortcoming of traditional nematode taxonomy: the difficulty of rapid species identification or identification at any level (even genus) for non-experts,” the scientists wrote in their grant proposal. “We propose to overcome this impediment by using the detailed species inventory of Cephaloboidea at DCR as the basis for application of next-generation sequencing for species identification. Challenges of minute nematode structure are addressed with novel, relatively simpler morphological approaches for broad application. A final objective is to refine the existing molecular phylogeny for Cephaloboidea, based on global collections.”
The primary study site, Philip L. Boyd Deep Canyon Reserve Research Center, is a biological field station located in the Sonoran Desert, Riverside County, five miles from the city of Palm Desert. The 6100-acre reserve was established in 1958 as a UC Riverside campus reserve, and in 1965 as a Natural Reserve System site.
A component of the grant outreach program involves recruiting undergraduate students at Spelman College, Atlanta, Ga., through the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). This NSF program provides research opportunities to undergraduate students interested in pursuing graduate study in science and engineering. In addition, new instructional tools and training approaches involving soils will be developed for grades 5-12.
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--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894