The National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) awarded a $290,422 Project Grant to Washington State University (WSU) on May 15, 2025. The grant supports a 4-year research project to explore how changes in environmental stress, specifically body temperature fluctuations, can alter physiological functional diversity among individuals within animal populations, using intertidal mussels as a model. The research team will combine manipulative experiments with advanced quantitative proteomics to document shifts in protein expression subnetworks that differentiate individual mussels in their stress resistance. This integrative, omics-to-organisms approach aims to provide vital environmental context to the genomes-to-phenomes framework and improve biological forecasting for how animals will perform in more variable and novel environmental conditions. The project will also fund the mentoring of a diverse set of trainees, including a postdoc, PhD students, and undergraduates, who will present their findings at conferences. Additionally, the grant will support a collaborative scientific working group focused on merging physiology and genomics to better predict animal performance in future environmental changes.
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