Dr. Juliet Marie Wong

I am starting a project to investigate the role of epigenetic processes in providing rapid intragenerational and transgenerational plasticity within an ecosystem severely threatened by climate change. I am assessing epigenetic patterns, and their connection to varying genotypes, demography, and physiological responses, in Diadema antillarum inhabiting coastal areas of Puerto Rico that naturally differ in their temperature regimes. This project will include mentoring of undergraduate students at Florida International University and the University of Puerto Rico. I am also planning public outreach activities with the Sociedad Ambiente Marino conservation organization and at the Marine Academy of Science and Technology at FIU-BBC. This work is funded through a recently awarded NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology.

I am excited to be collaborating on the E5 project in Mo’orea, French Polynesia. This project spans five institutions (Florida International University, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Washington, the University of California Santa Barbara, and Shedd Aquarium) as part of NSF’s Understanding the Rules of Life (URoL): Epigenetics program. This project aims to study environmental-energetic-epigenetic linkages in reef-building corals, and how these linkages impact coral ecology and evolution. Using symbiotic, reef-building corals as our study system, our goal is to elucidate relationships that are the basis for Rules of Life with respect to epigenetics.

My past research focused on the red sea urchin, Mesocentrotus franciscanus, an ecologically and economically important fisheries species.  I am interested in how their early developmental stages are impacted by various pH and temperature conditions.  My experiments were informed by oceanographic sensor data collected by the Hofmann Lab to implement laboratory treatments that were ecologically relevant. I used a combination of epigenetic, transcriptomic, and physiological approaches to investigate how these organisms are responding to current ocean conditions, and to predict how they will respond to future ocean acidification and warming. 

I investigated transgenerational plasticity in the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, to determine if the environmental conditions the parental generation experience impacts the phenotype of their offspring. I examined how adult conditioning to different combined pCO2 levels and temperatures impacted the offspring response to abiotic stress, and found that the transcriptomic response of embryos to high pCO2 conditions can be affected by the environmental conditions experienced by their parents. These transgenerational effects may be due to differences in maternal provisioning or epigenetic marks.

I have previously investigated how ocean acidification and warming impact the Antarctic pteropod, Limacina helicina antarctica. These pteropods are a major food source for many Antarctic fish species, thereby playing an integral role in the Antarctic foodweb. Along with other members of the Hofmann Lab, we studied how the metabolism of these pteropods were altered in response to changes in pH and temperature. Additionally, we explored the gene expression patterns of L. helicina antarctica collected in the field, using transcriptomic data in combination with oceanographic data to gain insight into how pteropod populations are responding to current ocean conditions.