Deadline: April 1, 2024
We are seeking a highly qualified, ambitious, and motivated PhD candidate for a fully-funded 4 year project focusing on genomics of Arctic alien plants. The project will focus on target alien plant species and seek to uncover their genomic basis of adaptation to the Arctic environment and how it relates to their invasiveness.
A warming climate, changes in soil properties, and rising human activity in the Arctic increase the probability of introduction and establishment of alien plant species. In high-Arctic Svalbard and other Arctic regions, the wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris) is an established and naturalised alien species. Hypotheses for its success include multiple introductions from different genetic sources, enemy release advantage related to plant defense compounds, and shifts in adaptive traits. The PhD project will develop genomic datasets, making use of field collections and herbarium resources, and develop experimental evidence to examine links between the genomic basis of successful establishment and potential invasiveness in the high-Arctic. The wintercress will be a primary focus of the project, but complementary research on parallel systems may be developed. The project will add an important evolutionary component to ongoing interdisciplinary research on Arctic greening.
The work will consist of arctic field work, herbarium work, green house experimental work, DNA lab and bioinformatics in an international interdisciplinary team. More specifically, the successful candidate will:
- Manage and supervise third-party services to achieve high-quality reference genomes suitable for population genomic analyses
- Assemble a spatial and temporal sampling of herbarium and fresh specimens
- Produce NGS libraries and sequencing data using clean-lab facilities and third-party services
- Analyse sequencing data combined with available genomic resources and complementary experimental evidence to unravel the evolutionary history of parallel Arctic invasions, including the phylogeography of established populations, the genetic architecture of adaptation to the Arctic environment, and the role of different chemotypes in the context of the enemy release hypothesis
- Analyse temporal data to assess turnover of allele frequencies following introduction and bottlenecks
- Design and perform common garden experiments to test the adaptive role of shifts in enemy pressure, breeding system and life-history traits underlying invasiveness under current and future climate
- Disseminate results in scientific literature, to relevant stakeholders and the public
The candidate will use the NTNU University Museum’s herbarium, genomics laboratory facilities and computational resources, and the work will be closely associated with a project on Arctic greening (https://geobiology.ethz.ch/research/arctic-greening.html) based at ETH Zürich. The work will also be part of the Nordic Borealization Network (NordBorN) that seeks to understand the processes, drivers, and consequences of changes in the species composition of tundra ecosystems.
Feel free to reach out with any enquires: kristine.b.westergaard@ntnu.no.
Full details and link to apply here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/ledige-stillinger/stilling/255087