Months without light. Bitter, biting winds. Glacial waters. The harsh environment of the Antarctic should be utterly uninhabitable – and yet, countless species have flourished in its icy seas and on its rocky shores.   

How have organisms as diverse as elephant seals and Antarctic hair grass adapted to these extreme conditions? And how will they continue to adapt — or not — in environmental change over seasons, decades, and evolutionary timescales?

A new $18.4 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 (MSRI) program aims to build the infrastructure to answer these questions. 

The project, “Genome Infrastructure catalyzing next Generation Antarctic Data, Access, Tools, and Analytics” (GIGA DATA), is led by Alison Murray at the Desert Research Institute. $6.6 million of the award is coming to UConn, where co-PIs Rachel O’Neill and Jill Wegrzyn will contribute their genome sequencing and assembly expertise. 

Follow this link for the full article in UConn Today.

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