Lenore Pipes Selected To Receive National Science Foundation EPSCoR Research Fellows Award
Pipes, an assistant professor at the Pacific Biosciences Research Center, will develop computational methods to recover biological information from ancient DNA preserved in seafloor sediments, helping to reconstruct past marine communities and build historical baselines for understanding how ocean biodiversity responds to climate change.
In standard marine environments, ancient DNA preserved in deep-sea sediments degrades into extremely short, damaged fragments. Current methods can mistake that damage for evolutionary change, making it difficult to accurately identify the organisms represented in the samples.
Pipes will work with Brice Semmens and Nastassia Patin at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego to sample refrigerated marine sediment cores and develop new computational methods that account for ancient DNA damage. The approach could recover highly degraded genetic material, including from highly diverged and extinct marine taxa, that standard mapping tools may miss.