Elizabeth Weller
Project
Use of environmental nucleic acids: modeling ecological dynamics in aquatic systemsMy doctoral research advances environmental DNA (eDNA) and RNA (eRNA) from tools for species detection toward more informative measures of aquatic systems. I first established a mechanistic framework for interpreting these signals by providing the first integrated quantification of eDNA and eRNA shedding, degradation, and sedimentation, showing that molecule and marker type strongly determine how environmental signals are produced and persist. I then tested whether eRNA retains meaningful biological information after release from organisms and found that environmental gene-expression patterns reflected organismal responses. Building on these foundations, I developed the first targeted, multispecies eRNA biomarkers for physiological stress, demonstrating that conserved stress responses can be recovered directly from water without organism capture or tissue sampling. In controlled mesocosms, the environmental biomarkers reproduced the expected direction of tissue responses across the full panel, with six markers showing significant differential expression under heat stress. Together, these results establish both how environmental nucleic acid signals should be interpreted and how they can be expanded into scalable, non-invasive tools for detecting biological responses to environmental change.
