Professors Marcia Marston and Koty Sharp join research team from four universities to study how marine and aquatic viruses impact microbes

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Roger Williams UniversityDOCS@RWUFeatured News Story The Week at Roger8-2-2017RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic VirusesPublic Affairs, Roger Williams UniversityUniversity of DelawareFollow this and additional works at: https://docs.rwu.edu/weekatroger_featured_newsPart of the Higher Education CommonsThis News Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Week at Roger at DOCS@RWU. It has been accepted for inclusion in FeaturedNews Story by an authorized administrator of DOCS@RWU. For more information, please contact mwu@rwu.edu.Recommended CitationPublic Affairs, Roger Williams University and University of Delaware, "RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3 Million NSFGrant Investigating Aquatic Viruses" (2017). Featured News Story. 273.https://docs.rwu.edu/weekatroger_featured_news/27311/7/2018 RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3 Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic Viruses | Roger Williams Universityhttps://www.rwu.edu/news/news-archive/rwu-marine-scientists-collaborate-3-million-nsf-grant-investigating-aquatic-viruses 1/3 News ArchiveRWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic VirusesProfessors Marcia Marston and Koty Sharp join research team from fouruniversities to study how marine and aquatic viruses impact microbesRWU Professor of Biology Marcia Marston is a co-principalinvestigator on a multi-university research team investigating viral-host interactions via a $3 million National Science Foundation grant.August 2, 2017 By UD and RWU Public A airs Sta sBRISTOL, R.I. – Roger Williams University’s Marcia Marston and Koty Sharp are joining a researchteam from four universities that has received a $3 million grant to probe how viruses impactmicrobes critical to our lives, from producing oxygen to growing food.K. Eric Wommack, deputy dean in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at theUniversity of Delaware, will lead the team of marine scientists, which includes researchers fromRoger Williams, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Hawaii-Manoa.The four-year project was announced by the National Science Foundation’s Established Program toStimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) on August 2. This collaboration is among eight projectsacross the U.S., totaling $41.7 million, that aim to build U.S. research capacity in understanding therelationship in organisms between their genes and their physical characteristics. Uncovering thisgenotype-to-phenotype relationship holds potential for improved crop yields, better prediction ofhuman disease risk, and new drug therapies.11/7/2018 RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3 Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic Viruses | Roger Williams Universityhttps://www.rwu.edu/news/news-archive/rwu-marine-scientists-collaborate-3-million-nsf-grant-investigating-aquatic-viruses 2/3“Over the past several decades, scientists and engineers have made massive strides in decoding,amassing and storing genomic data,” said Denise Barnes, NSF EPSCoR head. “But understandinghow genomics in uence phenotype remains one of the more profound challenges in science.These awards lay the groundwork for closing some of the biggest gaps in biological knowledgeand developing interdisciplinary teams needed to address the challenges.”From water and soil to the human gut, you’ll  nd single-celled microbes – and viruses rightalongside them. A virus will infect a microbe, hijack its machinery and begin replicating, eventuallykilling the host. But how these processes work within complex microbial communities is still largelya mystery.RWU’s Marston and Sharp, along with their collaborators in Delaware, Nebraska and Hawaii, willfocus research on viruses that infect phytoplankton – microscopic organisms that live in the saltyocean to freshwater lakes and conduct photosynthesis. Each researcher on the multi-institutionteam will examine a marine or aquatic virus that infects a di erent type of phytoplankton and from alltypes of bodies of water.Drawing upon her 20-year collection of marine viruses sampled from Narragansett Bay, Marston’sresearch will analyze the genetic connection between marine viruses from local waters and theircyanobacteria hosts, called Synechococcus. Meanwhile, Sharp will train a spotlight on how virusesin uence Astrangia poculata, a temperate species also known as Northern Star Coral that inhabitwaters from Florida to Massachusetts.“We will strive to make the link between genome sequences of viruses and their hosts, and how thegenes of both organisms play a part in determining the outcome of viral-host interactions,” saidMarston, a professor of biology at RWU who has received multiple NSF grants to conduct herresearch on marine viruses in Narragansett Bay. “As the host, phytoplankton form the base of themarine food web and are essentially what all other organisms rely on. It’s critical for us to understandthe biology of these interactions because viruses infect and o en kill their hosts, which can haverepercussions for organisms higher up on the food web.”Roger Williams University is one of only a few undergraduate-focused institutions to be included inthe NSF’s EPSCoR award, and included in this project will be opportunities for many RWUundergraduate researchers to contribute to the research. While the partnering institutions willemploy primarily post-doctoral fellows and graduate students in the research, Marston and Sharpwill bring upwards of eight undergraduate students onto their teams, to conduct research andcollaborate with researchers from all the universities, and present their research at nationalconferences.“Professors Marston and Sharp’s new NSF collaborative grant is an outstanding example of howRoger Williams University promotes important research experiences not only for faculty, but also forundergraduate students,” RWU President Donald Farish said. “As a predominantly undergraduateinstitution, our faculty work closely with students on projects with critical contributions to local andnational research topics.”11/7/2018 RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3 Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic Viruses | Roger Williams Universityhttps://www.rwu.edu/news/news-archive/rwu-marine-scientists-collaborate-3-million-nsf-grant-investigating-aquatic-viruses 3/3One of the goals of the multi-university collaboration will be to develop new technology to enablescientists to examine – in a droplet of water smaller than mist – how a single virus and a singlemicrobial cell interact. They aim to make new tools and resources in micro uids technologyavailable to the broader scienti c community, Wommack says.“Imagine doing a classic microbiology experiment with test tubes and culture plates. Our researchwould take all of those test tubes and cultures and reduce them down to a tiny droplet 100 timessmaller than the diameter of a human hair,” said Wommack, who is an expert in environmentalmicrobiology.Operating under the principle that oil and water don’t mix, the interdisciplinary team will createdevices the size of a microscope slide, equipped with tiny incubation chambers  lled with oil, toisolate individual droplets of water injected with a syringe. Molds for these micro uidic devices willbe fabricated in UD’s state-of-the-art Nanofabrication Facility for collaborators David Dunigan andJim Van Etten at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Grieg Steward and Kyle Edwards at theUniversity of Hawaii-Manoa, and Marston and Sharp at RWU.The research team also will create the Viral Informatics Resource for Genome Organization(VIRGO).  “We have troves of genomic data on viruses,” Wommack said. “What’s limiting our work is that wedon’t know the connections between the genes and what the viruses do biologically. How quicklydo viruses infect a host? How long do they take to reproduce? What happens to the infected cell?Once we have that information in VIRGO, we can look at a viral community and make inferencesabout how unknown viral populations will behave.”ACADEMICS FEINSTEIN SCHOOL OF SOCIAL AND NATURAL SCIENCES

RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3 Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic Viruses

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RWU Marine Scientists to Collaborate on $3 Million NSF Grant Investigating Aquatic Viruses

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