Submitted by Vanessa Bismuth on Thu, 24/03/2022 - 14:58
The award worth $1.2 million will support research into biofilms and their resilience to complex environment.
As an Early Career investigator, it can be difficult to start cutting-edge, risky projects with other laboratories in different countries Diana Fusco
Dr Diana Fusco, Assistant Professor in Biological Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, has received a 2022 Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) collaborative Research Grant to investigate biofilm heterogeneity as an evolutionary mechanism for resilience to complex environment
The work is a joint project with two other young investigators – Luis Ruiz Pastena from the University of Miami (USA) and Carolina Tropini from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada)
HFSP collaborative Early Career Research Grants provide three years of support for projects under the umbrella theme “Complex mechanisms of living organisms”. Highly competitive, the grants are awarded to the top four per cent of applicants. Dr Fusco’s $1.2 million grant was one of seven successful grants that went through a rigorous year-long global selection process.
Biofilms are bacterial communities made of numerous living micro-organisms evolving and growing as a collective. They are some of the most ubiquitous and resilient life-forms on the planet.
“We hypothesise that such resilience results from the ability of the residing bacteria to adapt their behaviour to the environmental cues while coordinating these decisions across several thousands of cells,” said Fusco.
The project aims to test this hypothesis by bringing together an international team that provides the wide range of expertise - from multi-scale modelling to evolutionary experiments - necessary to investigate the uncanny resemblance between biofilm morphogenesis and development in multi-cellular organisms.
“As an Early Career investigator, it can be difficult to start cutting-edge, risky projects with other laboratories in different countries,” said Fusco. “I am delighted to receive this highly competitive HFSP grant and excited to start working on this true global collaboration with my colleagues in Canada and the USA.”
HFSP Early Career Grants (formerly Young Investigator Grants) are for applicants within 5 years of establishing their independent research group and no more than 10 years from their doctoral degree.
Image:
Fluorescence image of a B. subtilis biofilm showing coordinated spatio-temporal patterns in extra-cellular matrix production (in red) and motility (in yellow). Credit: Nikhil Krishnan