Biology faculty awarded NSF: EDGE grant
After being selected for a substantive U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Douglas Risser, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Biology, will spend the next few years developing genomic tools for better understanding a cyanobacterium and its makeup.
Awarded by the NSF through their “Enabling Discovery through GEnomics” (EDGE) program, the “Functional genomics tools for the filamentous cyanobacterium Nostoc punctiforme” grant provides Risser with $701,884 to continue his research into the organism, some of which he’s already laid the foundation for.
“The EDGE program funds labs to develop new genetic tools to do genetic manipulation on less traditional and less understood model organisms,” said Risser. “We’ve done a lot of the groundwork and putting in the preliminary data to show that these tools are feasible. One of the main goals is to build a comprehensive transposon library, which will allow us to basically identify all the genes in the genome that are associated with a function. We’ve already built out the tool somewhat and tested it with a small library, so now the goal is just to do that on a much larger scale.”
Risser’s project will involve not only the development of the genomic tools, but also the development of training materials for use in other labs, opportunities for students to participate in research and an exhibition at the Colorado Springs Cool Science Festival. Potential future applications for this cyanobacterium include a natural sunscreen, improved fertilizer formulas and potential biofuel uses.
Additionally, this undertaking allows for exponential advances in the current knowledge of this cyanobacterium, an exciting aspect for Risser.
“I’ve been working with this organism ever since I started my postdoc in 2009, so about 15 years, and we’ve made a lot of progress but the types of tools we’ve been using are a bit outdated,” said Risser. “Being able to move to very modern, high-throughput tool sets will drastically open up the amount of work we can do and things we can learn. Once the transposon library is built and ready for use in about two years, I’ll be able to do more than I have in the past nine years. And we can apply this library to do lots of other things, so the speed with which we will be able to learn about this organism is going to increase dramatically.”