Randolph-Macon College Biology Professor Grace Lim-Fong has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) collaborative grant. The three-year, $492,416 grant will fund “Biogeography of a marine defensive microbial symbiont: relative importance of host defense vs. abiotic factors.” Lim-Fong will collaborate with Professor Nicole Lopanik, a Georgia Tech research scientist in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Sabbatical Research and Partnership
“The grant will fund undergraduate research at RMC and is currently supporting my sabbatical research,” explains Lim-Fong. The proposed research aims to understand the environmental factors that play a role in regulating the symbiosis between a marine invertebrate and its defensive symbiont. RMC students will conduct field work along the Virginia Eastern Shore and North Carolina coast and will utilize molecular methods in the lab to analyze their specimens.

“The symbiont protects the invertebrate larvae from predation,” says Lim-Fong. “We know that this symbiotic partnership is more prevalent in North Carolina and points south and less prevalent up north. We are transplanting the invertebrates across different latitudes to try to understand why this pattern of symbiosis exists.”

Lim-Fong will also partner with a high school science teacher on the Eastern Shore and train her students to perform some “citizen science” as part of data collection for this project.

“One possible environmental factor that we are investigating is the predation environment at different latitudes,” she says. “We want to know if there are more (or different kinds of) predators at low latitudes. Andrea McCready and her marine biology students at Northampton High School will be cataloguing the marine invertebrates on the Eastern Shore—one of our field sites where we will be measuring predation levels. Through their participation, these students will also be introduced to basic principles in marine ecology, field work, and quantitative biology.”

Grace Lim-Fong
Lim-Fong, whose current research is centered on bryozoan-bacterium symbioses, joined the faculty in 2009. She earned her B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley and her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. In 2013 she was presented the Thomas Branch Award for Excellence in Teaching Award at RMC’s Honors Convocation. That same year, Lim-Fong was awarded a Jeffress Trust Award in Interdisciplinary Research.