Explore as a

Search Marsden awards 2008–2017

Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017

Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2016

Title: Becoming master of your destiny: insights into genome activation from nuclear structure

Recipient(s): Associate Professor JA Horsfield | PI | University of Otago
Dr JM O'Sullivan | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr NL Vastenhouw | AI | Max Planck Institute: Generic code

Public Summary: When a zygote forms, its newly-minted genome is kept mostly inactive at first. At a defined timepoint, the zygotic genome becomes active and is transcribed. For the first time, the embryo becomes master of its own destiny. We hypothesise that formation of a transcription-competent, three-dimensional (3D) nuclear structure triggers zygotic genome activation and predicts developmental trajectory. Using cutting-edge genomics techniques that capture nuclear structure, we will test our hypothesis in zebrafish embryos. We will also use live imaging of zebrafish embryos and individual cells as they undergo genome activation, to observe visible changes in the nucleus as genes are switched on. Our overall aims are 1) To discover the transcription-permissive 3D nuclear structure underpinning zygotic genome activation, and 2) to disrupt 3D nuclear structure and determine the consequences for zygotic genome activation. Our research will provide the first evidence for how 3D nuclear structure places an animal under the control of its own genes for the first time, and will determine how important nuclear structure is for gene activation. Determining how the zygotic genome is at first held inactive, and how it rapidly becomes activated, will provide new insight into the very beginnings of life.

Total Awarded: $810,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Otago

Contact Person: Associate Professor JA Horsfield

Panel: CMP

Project ID: 16-UOO-072


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2014

Title: Bed roughness controls on mangrove swamp stability

Recipient(s): Associate Professor KR Bryan | PI | University of Waikato
Dr JM Mullarney | PI | University of Waikato
Associate Professor SM Henderson | AI | Washington State University

Public Summary: Despite expanding invasively locally, mangroves are declining worldwide, substantially depleting one of the world’s most effective carbon-burial ecosystems. Mangroves spread seaward by establishing seedlings and roots, which alter the hydrodynamics in a way that defies our standard engineering models. Depending on their density, these structures can enhance (due to stirring of sediments) or reduce (due to frictional removal of energy) sediment supply to mangrove swamps. At higher densities, and depending on the water depth, the flow can partially skim over structures rather than penetrate to the bed. This skimming flow can generate shear and eddies at the top of the root and seedling structures which may be especially effective at lifting sediment into the water. On a larger scale, sediment moving between these structures and the established canopy controls sediment deposition and changes to bed elevation within the swamp. Our research will examine the dynamic behaviour of sediment movement at the canopy-fringe boundary, and show how subtle variations in the nature of the fringing environment control swamp morphology, the inundation regime, and ultimately the ability of mangroves to establish and expand.

Total Awarded: $710,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Waikato

Contact Person: Associate Professor KR Bryan

Panel: EIS

Project ID: 14-UOW-011


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2009

Title: Beethoven's middle period string quartets in context: ideology, performance, reception

Recipient(s): Dr NR November | PI | The University of Auckland

Public Summary: This research will produce the first detailed and broadly contextual study of Beethoven's middle period string quartets. The resulting book will both extend and critique previous scholarship, exploring the contexts of these works' composition, and their performance and reception histories. The methodology entails comparative analysis of little-studied contemporary works and discourse analysis of a broader range of reception documents than has been typical in Beethoven studies, including visual, verbal, and auditory discourses. This research will challenge paradigms of musical style and historiography that have been central to these works' reception, to Beethoven studies, and to Western music studies more generally.

Total Awarded: $253,333

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Dr NR November

Panel: HUM

Project ID: 09-UOA-052


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2017

Title: Behaviour Before Evolution? A transdisciplinary investigation into the role of self-preserving behaviour at the origin of life

Recipient(s): Dr MD Egbert | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr MM Hanczyc | AI | University of Trento

Public Summary: How did life emerge out of a non-living world? This is one of the most fundamental open questions in science. Origins of life research has made substantial advances in understanding how life’s molecular building blocks emerged, but it remains unclear what caused this soup of biomolecules to develop into a first integrated organism. We propose that an essential and universal aspect of life, behaviour, is missing from conventional approaches to understanding this major transition. Recent advances have shown that (i) ‘metabolism-based’ behaviours are performed by a number of simple systems that could have existed before life, and (ii) that these behaviours can improve robustness, heritable variety and evolvability. We thus set out to investigate the hypothesis that behaviour played an essential role in facilitating the very earliest stages of life's evolution.

To investigate this hypothesis, we will take an interdisciplinary approach that focuses upon the simplest known physical systems that accomplish ‘metabolism-based’ behaviours: motile oil-droplets and ramified charge-transportation networks. The proposed research has the potential to radically transform how we view life and its origins, and to provide insight into how we might harness biological adaptivity to advance technological innovation.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Dr MD Egbert

Panel: EEB

Project ID: 17-UOA-196


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2017

Title: Better red than dead: Ancient origins of stress tolerance in land plants

Recipient(s): Dr KM Davies | PI | Plant & Food Research
Professor BR Jordan | PI | Lincoln University
Dr NW Albert | AI | Plant & Food Research
Professor JL Bowman | AI | Monash University
Dr DA Brummell | AI | New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Ltd
Dr KE Schwinn | AI | Plant & Food Research

Public Summary: Liverworts are the closest living relatives of the first land plants and retain features lost in the more recently evolved seed plants. A remarkable feature of liverworts is the ability of some to survive extreme stresses, such as long periods of desiccation or the cold of the polar regions. Among the 8,000 species are ones growing from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from lakes to deserts. Liverworts under stress produce the red pigment riccionidin in their cell walls. We have discovered that riccionidin is made by a previously unknown branch of the flavonoid pathway. Flavonoids are key stress-tolerance compounds unique to land plants, and are thought to have arisen during the transition from life in water to life on land. Using genetic and physiology studies with the liverwort model Marchantia, we will test the hypothesis that riccionidin has elegant dual functionality in stress tolerance, screening damaging light and modifying the cell wall to reduce water loss. The project will rewrite our understanding of the evolution of the flavonoid pathway, as well as elucidate how plants cope with extreme environments – a key question not only from an evolutionary viewpoint but also regarding the increasing environmental stresses on ecosystems and crops.

Total Awarded: $895,000

Duration: 3

Host: Plant & Food Research

Contact Person: Dr KM Davies

Panel: CMP

Project ID: 17-PAF-006


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2015

Title: Better, faster, stronger: bionic enzymes for artificial substrates

Recipient(s): Associate Professor DF Ackerley | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr WM Patrick | AI | University of Otago

Public Summary: Nature has evolved enzymes to be exquisitely effective catalysts of biological reactions. Attempts by enzyme engineers to mimic evolutionary processes, and thereby redesign enzymes for activity with artificial substrates, have generally yielded far less effective catalysts. This suggests that current experimental paradigms for enzyme evolution are inadequate. We have assembled a unique set of tools to allow us to approach this problem from a different direction. We will use simultaneous mass mutagenesis of multiple amino acids, followed by application of powerful positive selection pressures, to hollow out an existing enzyme and then rebuild its active site de novo. In a single leap, we will achieve unprecedented levels of activity with a range of artificial substrates. Retrospective analysis of the mutations needed to realise these high-level activities will shine new light on the evolutionary pathways that must be traversed to develop novel enzymatic functions. In parallel, we will constrain evolution by applying specific negative selection pressures in conjunction with our powerful positive selections, to test whether the development of high levels of substrate selectivity comes at the expense of overall catalytic efficiency.

Total Awarded: $825,000

Duration: 3

Host: Victoria University of Wellington

Contact Person: Associate Professor DF Ackerley

Panel: CMP

Project ID: 15-VUW-037


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2013

Title: Between local and global: a world history of Bluff

Recipient(s): Dr MJ Stevens | PI | University of Otago

Public Summary: This project is a historical case study of Bluff between the years 1800 and 2000 that will re-shape thinking about New Zealand’s economic development and race relations. As Southland’s sole deep-water port, Bluff was a key entry point for goods, people, livestock and ideas central to the lower South Island’s colonial development. In return it dispatched primary products to points throughout the British Empire. Even though it became an important cog in an imperial system, the port attracted and retained a relatively large number of Kai Tahu people. This project examines whether this constituted a Maori attempt to avoid or find a place within the economy, if this Maori presence shaped the port’s evolution, and whether or not the port underwrote or rewrote Maori lifeways. In exploring these questions, this study responds to calls for regional histories of Maori economies and their transnational linkages, and focuses very strongly on the interplay between economics, place, and community formation. In examining these factors and uncovering the way they sustained a robust Maori community, this project speaks to large historiographical questions in New Zealand. It also challenges the insular approach that tends to shape thinking and writing about the Maori past.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Otago

Contact Person: Dr MJ Stevens

Panel: HUM

Project ID: 13-UOO-078


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2017

Title: Betwixt two worlds? Disruptive technology and negotiating identity change

Recipient(s): Professor JA Hoek | PI | University of Otago
Ms ML Blank | AI | University of Otago
Dr TS Conner | AI | University of Otago
Dr SW Ferguson | AI | University of Otago
Dr LE Thompson | AI | University of Otago

Public Summary: Are electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) a disruptive technology that could dramatically reduce smoking or could vaping instead undermine cessation? Despite agreement that ENDS pose fewer health risks than smoked tobacco, many people do not fully replace smoking with vaping. We will explore this apparent paradox by probing how smokers negotiate new identity positions and which practices they retain, create or relinquish as they begin vaping. We will also examine whether and how vapers transition to become vape-free, thus offering new insights into a previously unexplored question.

Our novel mixed-methods approach will elicit data using longitudinal qualitative interviews, videographic analyses, and ecological momentary assessments, and develop contrasting perspectives on why and when transition from smoking to vaping, and beyond, occurs. We will use emerging social practice concepts to propose an over-arching explanation of how smoking and vaping practices intersect and evolve in relation to other practices. The Government’s plans to liberalise ENDS regulation make New Zealand a unique setting in which to analyse perplexing and unresolved questions about ENDS uptake. The new perspective we propose developing will complement dominant biomedical addiction discourse and provide a richer understanding of how ENDs, a disputed and ambiguous innovation, could improve health and well-being.

Total Awarded: $845,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Otago

Contact Person: Professor JA Hoek

Panel: SOC

Project ID: 17-UOO-129


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2010

Title: Beyond the blitz: Trauma and British fiction, 1939-1950

Recipient(s): Dr E Summers-Bremner | PI | The University of Auckland

Public Summary: What kind of fiction does war produce? Can fiction deliver truths about trauma when other forms cannot? How does it respond to everyday concerns? The public narrative of the Blitz describes English heroism in the face of German bombing 1940-41. The myth has elements of truth, but ignores evidence of a Britain full of anxieties. Concurrently the pioneering research group Mass-Observation asked ordinary people to write diary accounts of what they heard and saw. Their focus was on people's 'feelings, their worries, frustrations, hopes, desires and fears.' Updating participant records decades later, M-O found people typically revised their memories to match the public narrative of resilience. This study proposes a new archive with which to contextualise the M-O records: the period's experimental fiction. A trauma studies perspective historically developed in response to war enables a new understanding of modernism that reads literary fiction alongside diary accounts as distinctive responses to the same overdetermined phenomena. Comparing formally innovative novels and stories--works which make the world strange--with first person accounts of deeply estranging wartime events will enable clearer assessment of the extent to which a national literature can assist with managing the historical fallout of a changing culture.

Total Awarded: $353,998

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Dr E Summers-Bremner

Panel: HUM

Project ID: 10-UOA-029


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2016

Title: Beyond the Jury Paradox: Collective Decision-Making without Common Priors

Recipient(s): Dr S Lippert | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr S Fabrizi | PI | Massey University
Professor T Pfeiffer | AI | Massey University
Associate Professor MJ Ryan | AI | Auckland University of Technology

Public Summary: In many instances of decision-making, groups can perform better than individuals because a group’s aggregated information is more reliable than the information of any single individual. However, in collective deliberation the rules that translate individual votes into collective decisions have a profound impact on the quality of decisions. The Jury Paradox is a well-established illustration of this point: when requiring unanimous agreement rather than just a majority of votes, group decisions become prone to error because even well-intentioned group members have incentives to disregard information and vote strategically.
Yet, preliminary findings from our team suggest that the Jury Paradox is highly sensitive to the conventional – but unrealistic – assumption that voters use information whose reliability is precisely specified. When the reliability of information is ambiguous the Jury Paradox may vanish: unanimity may outperform majority voting. In the proposed project, we will develop robust theoretical models of collective decision-making with ambiguous information, and test these models in large-scale laboratory experiments. Our findings will resolve how different voting rules perform in given decision environments, and when to best use consensus. These findings will aid the institutional design of voting platforms, which are entering our digital lives at an accelerating pace.

Total Awarded: $705,000

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Dr S Lippert

Panel: EHB

Project ID: 16-UOA-190


Share our content