[Source: StockHouse.com] - Quebec-based Atrium Innovations (TSX: T.ATB, Stock Forum) announced Monday morning that it has acquired Nutri-Health Supplements, LLC of Arizona.
Atrium acquired NHS for a first consideration of US$23.9 million, with additional earn-out payments structured based on NHS' 2009 and 2010 EBITDA growth, says the company.
NHS owns proprietary Multi-Probiotic blends which include 16 probiotic strains that are “matrix encapsulated to survive stomach acid and deliver a high concentration of active cell cultures per capsule,” says Atrium.
"Buying Nutri-Health marks our first acquisition into the DTC segment with a company aligned with our values and objectives. NHS allows us to acquire complementary expertise in this market segment in which we had a limited business presence until now. This opens the door to promising, synergistic development opportunities within Atrium," said Pierre Fitzgibbon, president and chief executive officer of Atrium.
Atrium develops, manufactures and markets products for the health and nutrition industries. NHS markets, via multi-channel distribution, specialty niche products endorsed by health professionals.
Showing posts with label BioAgriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BioAgriculture. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
8 ASU faculty elected as AAAS Fellows
[Source ASU, Skip Derra] - Eight Arizona State University faculty members are among the 486 newly elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a prestigious international scientific society. AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society.
Brad Allenby, Richard Creath, James Elser, Patricia Gober, Nancy Grimm, Sudhir Kumar, Thomas Moore and John Spence will be recognized Feb. 14 at the Fellows forum, during the 2009 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago.
This year's election brings the total number of AAAS Fellows at Arizona State University to 54.
Becoming a Fellow is in recognition of efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Within that general framework, each awardee is honored for contributions to a specific field.
Braden Allenby is cited by the AAAS for "distinguished contributions to earth systems engineering and management, design for environment, industrial ecology and science and technology policy." He is a professor in ASU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, as well as a professor of law and of engineering and ethics with the Joan and David Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Recognized as a pioneer of modern industrial ecology, Allenby is co-director of the Center for Sustainable Engineering and is helping establish a new Center of Earth Systems Engineering and Management. He recently was named as one of the U.S. Professors of the Year for 2008 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Higher Education.
Richard Creath is cited by AAAS for "achievements in archiving and interpreting key documents in the historical development of scientific philosophy and demonstrating their relevance to current problems." Creath, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, is a philosopher of science and epistemologist who uses historical methods to illuminate fundamental questions about the nature of scientific reasoning and knowledge. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on philosophers Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. Quine. As general editor of the multi-volume Carnap Project, he leads an international team of two dozen leading researchers.
James Elser is cited by AAAS for "pioneering work in developing the theories of ecological and biological stoichiometry to integrate levels of biology from the genome to the biosphere and thereby improve our management of renewable resources." Elser, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, has built a career asking questions about evolutionary biology and energy and material flows in ecosystems, traveling from Antarctica to alpine lakes of Norway and Colorado to the Mongolian grasslands of China, to find answers. Understanding the balance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in systems forms the backbone of Elser's worldview, known as "stoichiometric theory." He has taught more than 10,000 students and his pioneering studies have shaped young minds and jumpstarted new research approaches, as well as provided insights into nutrient limitation, trophic dynamics, and biogeochemical cycling, evolution and integrated levels of organization from molecules to cells to ecosystems.
Patricia Gober, a human geographer and demographer, is co-director of the National Science Foundation's Decision Center for a Desert City, part of ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, and a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences. A former president of the Association of American Geographers, Gober's research focuses on the use of science and visualization for real-world decision-making, particularly in tackling the difficult water management decisions necessary in the face of growing climatic uncertainty in metropolitan Phoenix. Gober is cited by AAAS for her "outstanding record of scholarship and disciplinary leadership" and because she "clearly established herself as a leader within the discipline and has left a permanent mark within American geography."
Nancy Grimm is cited by AAAS for "pioneering studies of urban social-ecological systems that conceptually expand urban resource management, and for innovative contributions in stream ecology and biogeochemistry that have stimulated decades of research." Grimm, a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences, has for the past 10 years led the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project. CAP-LTER is centered on the analysis of urban-semi-arid ecosystem relationships. Through her collaborative work, Grimm has established a conceptual basis for including human choice and action in theory of urban ecosystem dynamics. The work on biogeochemistry, species distribution and abundance, and designed aquatic ecosystems in cities has revealed that many ecological features are best explained by combinations of social and biophysical drivers.
Sudhir Kumar directs the Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics in ASU's Biodesign Institute and is a professor of biology in the School of Life Sciences. He is cited by AAAS for "exemplary contributions in evolutionary bioinformatics, particularly in developing high-impact comparative analysis software for biologists and in illuminating the evolutionary dynamics of mutations and species through comparative genomics." Among his pioneering efforts was the software analysis of gene expression patterns from early gene expression patterns of fruit fly development, advanced work using protein molecular clocks to illuminate the Evolutionary Timescale of Life and the Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software package that makes useful methods of comparative sequence analysis easily accessible to the scientific community for research and education. Kumar also has received an Innovation Award in Functional Genomics from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2000.
Thomas Moore, a biochemist, is cited by AAAS for "pioneering research in artificial photosynthesis including the design of artificial reaction centers, antenna and assembling an energy-converting artificial photosynthetic membrane." Moore is a professor in ASU's chemistry and biochemistry department and director of the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis. Most recently, he served on the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Grand Challenges Committee, which produced "Directing Matter and Energy: Five Challenges for Science and the Imagination," outlining research priorities for the foreseeable future. Moore and colleagues collaborate on research in artificial photosynthesis, which is aimed at providing a deeper understanding of natural photosynthesis and the design, synthesis and assembly of bio-inspired constructs capable of sustainable energy production and conversion for human use.
John C.H. Spence is a Regents Professor in ASU's Department of Physics. He was cited by the AAAS for "distinguished contributions to diffraction physics, especially atomic-resolution electron microscopy, electron diffraction studies of the chemical bond and diffractive (lens-less) x-ray imaging." Spence undertakes experiments in condensed matter physics based around the use of electron beams for imaging, spectroscopy and diffraction. The work requires Spence's group to build or modify advanced instruments in order to do their experiments. Spence is currently working with others to get femtosecond "snapshots" of individual proteins using the first hard x-ray laser facility in the U.S., which will begin operation next year.
Brad Allenby, Richard Creath, James Elser, Patricia Gober, Nancy Grimm, Sudhir Kumar, Thomas Moore and John Spence will be recognized Feb. 14 at the Fellows forum, during the 2009 AAAS annual meeting in Chicago.
This year's election brings the total number of AAAS Fellows at Arizona State University to 54.
Becoming a Fellow is in recognition of efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Within that general framework, each awardee is honored for contributions to a specific field.
Braden Allenby is cited by the AAAS for "distinguished contributions to earth systems engineering and management, design for environment, industrial ecology and science and technology policy." He is a professor in ASU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, as well as a professor of law and of engineering and ethics with the Joan and David Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. Recognized as a pioneer of modern industrial ecology, Allenby is co-director of the Center for Sustainable Engineering and is helping establish a new Center of Earth Systems Engineering and Management. He recently was named as one of the U.S. Professors of the Year for 2008 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Higher Education.
Richard Creath is cited by AAAS for "achievements in archiving and interpreting key documents in the historical development of scientific philosophy and demonstrating their relevance to current problems." Creath, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, is a philosopher of science and epistemologist who uses historical methods to illuminate fundamental questions about the nature of scientific reasoning and knowledge. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on philosophers Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. Quine. As general editor of the multi-volume Carnap Project, he leads an international team of two dozen leading researchers.
James Elser is cited by AAAS for "pioneering work in developing the theories of ecological and biological stoichiometry to integrate levels of biology from the genome to the biosphere and thereby improve our management of renewable resources." Elser, a professor in the School of Life Sciences, has built a career asking questions about evolutionary biology and energy and material flows in ecosystems, traveling from Antarctica to alpine lakes of Norway and Colorado to the Mongolian grasslands of China, to find answers. Understanding the balance of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus in systems forms the backbone of Elser's worldview, known as "stoichiometric theory." He has taught more than 10,000 students and his pioneering studies have shaped young minds and jumpstarted new research approaches, as well as provided insights into nutrient limitation, trophic dynamics, and biogeochemical cycling, evolution and integrated levels of organization from molecules to cells to ecosystems.
Patricia Gober, a human geographer and demographer, is co-director of the National Science Foundation's Decision Center for a Desert City, part of ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability, and a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences. A former president of the Association of American Geographers, Gober's research focuses on the use of science and visualization for real-world decision-making, particularly in tackling the difficult water management decisions necessary in the face of growing climatic uncertainty in metropolitan Phoenix. Gober is cited by AAAS for her "outstanding record of scholarship and disciplinary leadership" and because she "clearly established herself as a leader within the discipline and has left a permanent mark within American geography."
Nancy Grimm is cited by AAAS for "pioneering studies of urban social-ecological systems that conceptually expand urban resource management, and for innovative contributions in stream ecology and biogeochemistry that have stimulated decades of research." Grimm, a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences, has for the past 10 years led the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research project. CAP-LTER is centered on the analysis of urban-semi-arid ecosystem relationships. Through her collaborative work, Grimm has established a conceptual basis for including human choice and action in theory of urban ecosystem dynamics. The work on biogeochemistry, species distribution and abundance, and designed aquatic ecosystems in cities has revealed that many ecological features are best explained by combinations of social and biophysical drivers.
Sudhir Kumar directs the Center for Evolutionary Functional Genomics in ASU's Biodesign Institute and is a professor of biology in the School of Life Sciences. He is cited by AAAS for "exemplary contributions in evolutionary bioinformatics, particularly in developing high-impact comparative analysis software for biologists and in illuminating the evolutionary dynamics of mutations and species through comparative genomics." Among his pioneering efforts was the software analysis of gene expression patterns from early gene expression patterns of fruit fly development, advanced work using protein molecular clocks to illuminate the Evolutionary Timescale of Life and the Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software package that makes useful methods of comparative sequence analysis easily accessible to the scientific community for research and education. Kumar also has received an Innovation Award in Functional Genomics from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2000.
Thomas Moore, a biochemist, is cited by AAAS for "pioneering research in artificial photosynthesis including the design of artificial reaction centers, antenna and assembling an energy-converting artificial photosynthetic membrane." Moore is a professor in ASU's chemistry and biochemistry department and director of the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis. Most recently, he served on the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Grand Challenges Committee, which produced "Directing Matter and Energy: Five Challenges for Science and the Imagination," outlining research priorities for the foreseeable future. Moore and colleagues collaborate on research in artificial photosynthesis, which is aimed at providing a deeper understanding of natural photosynthesis and the design, synthesis and assembly of bio-inspired constructs capable of sustainable energy production and conversion for human use.
John C.H. Spence is a Regents Professor in ASU's Department of Physics. He was cited by the AAAS for "distinguished contributions to diffraction physics, especially atomic-resolution electron microscopy, electron diffraction studies of the chemical bond and diffractive (lens-less) x-ray imaging." Spence undertakes experiments in condensed matter physics based around the use of electron beams for imaging, spectroscopy and diffraction. The work requires Spence's group to build or modify advanced instruments in order to do their experiments. Spence is currently working with others to get femtosecond "snapshots" of individual proteins using the first hard x-ray laser facility in the U.S., which will begin operation next year.
UA losing major bioscience researcher
[Source: Aaron Mackey, ARizona Daily Star] - The leader of the UA's top research institute — whom colleagues hail as a key architect of the region's burgeoning bioscience industry — is leaving to head a San Francisco-based non-profit's scientific endeavors, the university announced Monday.
Vicki Chandler, director of the University of Arizona's Bio5 Institute, played a critical role in establishing the collaborative research center, which has brought tens of millions of grant dollars to the UA, including a $50 million award thought to be the largest grant in Arizona history.
The second high-profile professor with ties to Bio5 to leave the UA this year, Chandler will become chief program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's science efforts in February.
In July, Bio5 founder Thomas Baldwin left the UA to become dean of UC-Riverside's College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. Baldwin founded the program, which at the time was known as the Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology, in 2001.
Besides being one of the UA's premier scientists, Chandler has become a regional ambassador for bioscience research, lobbying for state money to build research facilities while striving to tell the public about the importance of the work.
"She had a vision for Bio5 that was about much more than just scientific research," said Leslie Tolbert, the UA's vice president for research. "She has an enthusiasm for outreach and the role a university can play in community development."
Taking over Bio5 in 2002, Chandler led several efforts that culminated in the UA's landing a $50 million grant in January to establish the iPlant Collaborative, a research program aimed at unlocking the secrets of plant biology. That alone accounted for roughly 10 percent of the UA's overall $500 million research budget.
The project, co-led by Chandler, was seeded by state support in research funding and new buildings — both of which Chandler lobbied for, Tolbert said.
Chandler "has been a strong spokesperson with the Legislature and with private donors as well," Tolbert said. "She gets them to see that it isn't just about the institute in the abstract, but the people doing the science and getting results."
The Bio5 Institute is the UA's most prominent interdisciplinary research center, blending researchers from five fields —agriculture, medicine, pharmacy, basic science and engineering — with industry leaders to find solutions to common problems, such as disease.
The institute has been a pipeline for grants and also has proved successful at creating a number of spin-off companies that use technologies developed in UA laboratories.
Managing the complex relationships between business leaders and researchers, Chandler was integral in convincing several bioscience companies to either expand in or move to Tucson, said Joe Snell, president and CEO of Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc.
"Her leadership has been incredibly valuable in helping to position Tucson as the next bioscience hub," he said.
"I don't think we would be where we're at or where we're going without her efforts."
Chandler also has helped build interest in science among high school students and UA undergraduates. She holds summer programs that get high schoolers in laboratories with researchers and often touts how half the Bio5 researchers are undergrads.
She also has narrated the UA-produced PBS show "WaveLengths," which provides a 30-minute snapshot of some of the research produced on campus.
On top of that, Chandler maintains a full-time lab and conducts field research as a Regents Professor in both the plant science and molecular and cellular biology departments. She also holds the Weiler Endowed Chair for Excellence in Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Chandler, who has been at the UA since 1997, said she has mixed emotions about her new role.
"It's always exciting to take on a new challenge, but I poured my heart and soul into the University of Arizona and really care deeply for it," she said.
The move will take her back to her roots. She grew up in Northern California and studied at the University of California-Berkeley and UC-San Francisco while later working at Stanford after earning her Ph.D.
The foundation she is joining invests $300 million each year in projects, including science and environmental conservation research around San Francisco.
Even with her new job, Chandler will be in Tucson often. She plans to retain her endowed chair and conduct research as part of the iPlant Collaborative, a process she says will take up about 20 percent of her time.
"The university has been incredibly gracious to allow me to continue to research," she said. "By keeping my feet squarely planted in science, it will hopefully help me in my new position."
The UA will name an interim director of Bio5 early next year and plans to conduct a national search for a permanent replacement, Tolbert said.
Vicki Chandler, director of the University of Arizona's Bio5 Institute, played a critical role in establishing the collaborative research center, which has brought tens of millions of grant dollars to the UA, including a $50 million award thought to be the largest grant in Arizona history.
The second high-profile professor with ties to Bio5 to leave the UA this year, Chandler will become chief program officer for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's science efforts in February.
In July, Bio5 founder Thomas Baldwin left the UA to become dean of UC-Riverside's College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. Baldwin founded the program, which at the time was known as the Institute for Biomedical Science and Biotechnology, in 2001.
Besides being one of the UA's premier scientists, Chandler has become a regional ambassador for bioscience research, lobbying for state money to build research facilities while striving to tell the public about the importance of the work.
"She had a vision for Bio5 that was about much more than just scientific research," said Leslie Tolbert, the UA's vice president for research. "She has an enthusiasm for outreach and the role a university can play in community development."
Taking over Bio5 in 2002, Chandler led several efforts that culminated in the UA's landing a $50 million grant in January to establish the iPlant Collaborative, a research program aimed at unlocking the secrets of plant biology. That alone accounted for roughly 10 percent of the UA's overall $500 million research budget.
The project, co-led by Chandler, was seeded by state support in research funding and new buildings — both of which Chandler lobbied for, Tolbert said.
Chandler "has been a strong spokesperson with the Legislature and with private donors as well," Tolbert said. "She gets them to see that it isn't just about the institute in the abstract, but the people doing the science and getting results."
The Bio5 Institute is the UA's most prominent interdisciplinary research center, blending researchers from five fields —agriculture, medicine, pharmacy, basic science and engineering — with industry leaders to find solutions to common problems, such as disease.
The institute has been a pipeline for grants and also has proved successful at creating a number of spin-off companies that use technologies developed in UA laboratories.
Managing the complex relationships between business leaders and researchers, Chandler was integral in convincing several bioscience companies to either expand in or move to Tucson, said Joe Snell, president and CEO of Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc.
"Her leadership has been incredibly valuable in helping to position Tucson as the next bioscience hub," he said.
"I don't think we would be where we're at or where we're going without her efforts."
Chandler also has helped build interest in science among high school students and UA undergraduates. She holds summer programs that get high schoolers in laboratories with researchers and often touts how half the Bio5 researchers are undergrads.
She also has narrated the UA-produced PBS show "WaveLengths," which provides a 30-minute snapshot of some of the research produced on campus.
On top of that, Chandler maintains a full-time lab and conducts field research as a Regents Professor in both the plant science and molecular and cellular biology departments. She also holds the Weiler Endowed Chair for Excellence in Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Chandler, who has been at the UA since 1997, said she has mixed emotions about her new role.
"It's always exciting to take on a new challenge, but I poured my heart and soul into the University of Arizona and really care deeply for it," she said.
The move will take her back to her roots. She grew up in Northern California and studied at the University of California-Berkeley and UC-San Francisco while later working at Stanford after earning her Ph.D.
The foundation she is joining invests $300 million each year in projects, including science and environmental conservation research around San Francisco.
Even with her new job, Chandler will be in Tucson often. She plans to retain her endowed chair and conduct research as part of the iPlant Collaborative, a process she says will take up about 20 percent of her time.
"The university has been incredibly gracious to allow me to continue to research," she said. "By keeping my feet squarely planted in science, it will hopefully help me in my new position."
The UA will name an interim director of Bio5 early next year and plans to conduct a national search for a permanent replacement, Tolbert said.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Ant Researcher Nets Collaborative Innovation Award
[Source: Margaret Coulombe, Imperial Valley News] - The Fountain of Youth to be found in an anthill? Aging - we are all doing it. It is relentless and terminal. Auguries and alchemists, mendicants and magicians, philosophers and science fiction writers, researchers and plastic surgeons have employed all their various arts in the pursuits of “turning back the clock.” Yet, we stand in modern times with a span of a century to our name, at most. Technological wizardry abounds, so why do the factors that determine life span still elude us?
If you ask Arizona State University researcher Juergen Liebig, he would point to his favorite study animal, the ant, to provide answers.
Liebig is one of a trio of scientists who are taking an audacious approach to studying gene regulation, using the ant to model human aging, with support from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) $40 million pilot program, The Collaborative Innovation Awards.
As its name suggests, the award will allow scientists to attack problems that one person can’t solve, according to Jack Dixon, HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer.
“We were looking for projects that could really represent breakthroughs and change the way we think,” says Dixon.
One of eight teams selected, Liebig, assistant professor in School of Life Sciences and member of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will partner with team leader Danny Reinberg, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the New York University School of Medicine, and colleague Shelley Berger of the Wistar Institute, both top researchers in the field of epigenetics.
The eight collaborative projects collectively engage 33 researchers and 16 institutions in the United States and Chile. What can ants, not typically known for long life, tell us about human aging?
Potentially much, says Liebig. Ants in a colony are genetically closely related, yet these sisters’ body types, behavior and purpose can become specialized and vastly different. Queens typically arise as the single reproductive female in an ant colony, living for as long as 30 years in some species. As head of the colony they stay in the nest dedicated to perform one major task, egg-laying, for their whole life. Workers on the other hand perform brood care, colony maintenance, and complex foraging tasks. Among the workers additional behavioral and morphological differences may exist. Some individuals are larger and more robust with a focus on colony defense, which earned them the name soldiers. How can such big differences arise in each of these ant types’ longevity and behavior without some real differences in their DNA?
According to Liebig and his collaborators, the answer can be found in the rising field of epigenetics – the study of inherited changes in the activity of genes - for example, when they turned on or off; changes not caused by alterations in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic changes occur during normal development and tissue differentiation, and correlate with certain disease states in humans, such as cancer.
“But, little is known about the molecular basis for epigenetic changes that underlie aging or behavior,” Liebig says. “One advantage of using ants as models is that as individuals they follow very different behavioral and developmental trajectories, and these changes are plastic.”
It is this behavioral and developmental plasticity that drew the collaborators to work together.
Liebig studies three species of ants, each which allows the HHMI team to examine a different aspect of how epigenetic factors can influence outcomes in behavior, morphology, and longevity.
Harpegnathos saltator (literally meaning “jumping sickle jaw”) is a primitive species of ant where workers are able to perform either reproductive or helper tasks. A worker can become a reproductive functional queen, if the original queen dies or is removed. Such a trait is not found in “higher” order ants because these species have become structurally specialized. Carpenter ants, Camponotus floridanus, allow Liebig, Reinberg and Berger to examine what epigenetic factors or genes control longevity. Queens in this species are structurally specialized, growing large and also long-lived. Finally, using ants from the genus Pheidole, whose soldier caste development can be artificially induced, allows the researchers to closely examine (and potentially manipulate) what genes are expressed or repressed, and identify the factors regulating structural specialization and behavior.
The first task for the collaborative team will be to get the complete sequences of the genomes for these three ant species. Reinberg is currently identifying partners specialized to do this task. Then the group will examine the gene expression profiles of the different castes (worker, queen, soldier).
“This collaboration is fortuitous,” says Liebig. “Danny and Shelley were looking for a model system to study epigenetic factors of differences in ant behavior and development. They contacted my colleague Bert Hölldobler, who knew I was looking for geneticists interested in differential gene expression in behavior, aging, and development in ants.” Hölldobler is the Pulitzer Prize winning coauthor of “The Ants,” and leading expert in ant communication and social organization.
Liebig notes that the project is risky. For example, the complete sequence of the ant genome has never been achieved before.
“Often potential research partners are reluctant to cross barriers in scientific specialties and there is not funding for such risky ventures when there is interest to do them,” Liebig says.
“The beauty of this project is that the HHMI Collaborative Innovation Awards create the opportunity for us to blend our skills to develop a new approach and model system for the study of behavior and aging.”
Arizona State University has become the world leader in the study of social insects, and study of their levels of organization from organism to society, according to luminary Edward O. Wilson. Liebig believes that the study of social insects and using them as models for human systems has the potential to transform understanding about aging, sociobiology, neurobiology, learning and memory and behavior. Liebig believes his collaborators on the HHMI project would agree.
“Social insect societies are remarkable in that their specialization extends beyond the organism level, to function at the level of the ‘superorganism,’” Liebig notes. “In that way, the division of labor seen between reproductive and non-reproductive individuals is analogous to cellular specialization in different organs in a multicellular organism. The prediction is that epigenetic regulation may determine behavioural castes in ant colonies.”
“Who knows? Separating these effects may even give us the tools and understanding to look at what regulates longevity in humans,” Liebig adds.
If you ask Arizona State University researcher Juergen Liebig, he would point to his favorite study animal, the ant, to provide answers.
Liebig is one of a trio of scientists who are taking an audacious approach to studying gene regulation, using the ant to model human aging, with support from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) $40 million pilot program, The Collaborative Innovation Awards.
As its name suggests, the award will allow scientists to attack problems that one person can’t solve, according to Jack Dixon, HHMI vice president and chief scientific officer.
“We were looking for projects that could really represent breakthroughs and change the way we think,” says Dixon.
One of eight teams selected, Liebig, assistant professor in School of Life Sciences and member of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will partner with team leader Danny Reinberg, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the New York University School of Medicine, and colleague Shelley Berger of the Wistar Institute, both top researchers in the field of epigenetics.
The eight collaborative projects collectively engage 33 researchers and 16 institutions in the United States and Chile. What can ants, not typically known for long life, tell us about human aging?
Potentially much, says Liebig. Ants in a colony are genetically closely related, yet these sisters’ body types, behavior and purpose can become specialized and vastly different. Queens typically arise as the single reproductive female in an ant colony, living for as long as 30 years in some species. As head of the colony they stay in the nest dedicated to perform one major task, egg-laying, for their whole life. Workers on the other hand perform brood care, colony maintenance, and complex foraging tasks. Among the workers additional behavioral and morphological differences may exist. Some individuals are larger and more robust with a focus on colony defense, which earned them the name soldiers. How can such big differences arise in each of these ant types’ longevity and behavior without some real differences in their DNA?
According to Liebig and his collaborators, the answer can be found in the rising field of epigenetics – the study of inherited changes in the activity of genes - for example, when they turned on or off; changes not caused by alterations in the DNA sequence. Epigenetic changes occur during normal development and tissue differentiation, and correlate with certain disease states in humans, such as cancer.
“But, little is known about the molecular basis for epigenetic changes that underlie aging or behavior,” Liebig says. “One advantage of using ants as models is that as individuals they follow very different behavioral and developmental trajectories, and these changes are plastic.”
It is this behavioral and developmental plasticity that drew the collaborators to work together.
Liebig studies three species of ants, each which allows the HHMI team to examine a different aspect of how epigenetic factors can influence outcomes in behavior, morphology, and longevity.
Harpegnathos saltator (literally meaning “jumping sickle jaw”) is a primitive species of ant where workers are able to perform either reproductive or helper tasks. A worker can become a reproductive functional queen, if the original queen dies or is removed. Such a trait is not found in “higher” order ants because these species have become structurally specialized. Carpenter ants, Camponotus floridanus, allow Liebig, Reinberg and Berger to examine what epigenetic factors or genes control longevity. Queens in this species are structurally specialized, growing large and also long-lived. Finally, using ants from the genus Pheidole, whose soldier caste development can be artificially induced, allows the researchers to closely examine (and potentially manipulate) what genes are expressed or repressed, and identify the factors regulating structural specialization and behavior.
The first task for the collaborative team will be to get the complete sequences of the genomes for these three ant species. Reinberg is currently identifying partners specialized to do this task. Then the group will examine the gene expression profiles of the different castes (worker, queen, soldier).
“This collaboration is fortuitous,” says Liebig. “Danny and Shelley were looking for a model system to study epigenetic factors of differences in ant behavior and development. They contacted my colleague Bert Hölldobler, who knew I was looking for geneticists interested in differential gene expression in behavior, aging, and development in ants.” Hölldobler is the Pulitzer Prize winning coauthor of “The Ants,” and leading expert in ant communication and social organization.
Liebig notes that the project is risky. For example, the complete sequence of the ant genome has never been achieved before.
“Often potential research partners are reluctant to cross barriers in scientific specialties and there is not funding for such risky ventures when there is interest to do them,” Liebig says.
“The beauty of this project is that the HHMI Collaborative Innovation Awards create the opportunity for us to blend our skills to develop a new approach and model system for the study of behavior and aging.”
Arizona State University has become the world leader in the study of social insects, and study of their levels of organization from organism to society, according to luminary Edward O. Wilson. Liebig believes that the study of social insects and using them as models for human systems has the potential to transform understanding about aging, sociobiology, neurobiology, learning and memory and behavior. Liebig believes his collaborators on the HHMI project would agree.
“Social insect societies are remarkable in that their specialization extends beyond the organism level, to function at the level of the ‘superorganism,’” Liebig notes. “In that way, the division of labor seen between reproductive and non-reproductive individuals is analogous to cellular specialization in different organs in a multicellular organism. The prediction is that epigenetic regulation may determine behavioural castes in ant colonies.”
“Who knows? Separating these effects may even give us the tools and understanding to look at what regulates longevity in humans,” Liebig adds.
Desert plant's properties eyed for Canadian oilseed
[Source: Manitoba Cooperation] - Properties of a "cactus-like" plant from Arizona might have a future in Canada in an oilseed crop for the industrial lubricant market.
Randall Weselake, a professor at the University of Alberta's department of agricultural, food and nutritional science, has lined up $360,000 for a research team to experiment with seeds from the plant, called lesquerella.
Lesquerella naturally produces high levels of certain fatty acids that are "particularly suited" to production of lubricants and other industrial oils, the university said in a release Friday.
Weselake's team aims to transfer that particular trait into a "canola-like" oilseed plant grown in Canada, the end goal being to produce a "fine liquid wax with superior industrial properties."
If such research pans out, it could "substantially increase the industrial uses of plant oils and serve as a high-performance lubricant," Weselake said in the release Friday.
The canola-like plant in this case would be Brassica carinata, which would be genetically modified using an enzyme from lesquerella, to help convert the plant oils into a liquid wax that's more resistant to high temperatures and pressures than unmodified plant oils, the university said.
Potential applications include automobile transmission fluid, hydraulic fluids, adhesives and numerous industrial lubricants, the university added.
"The overall goal is to decrease reliance on fossil oils currently used in the global chemicals industry," Chris Kazala, manager of the university's BioActive Oils program and a research team member, said in the same release.
"Using plants to produce these products provides a secure, environmentally sustainable supply of these materials for industry and is, in many cases, easier to manufacture."
The funding for the U of A project comes from Avac Ltd., the Calgary-based venture capital fund launched in 1997 by the province with added start-up money from the federal government, to expand value-added industry in Alberta with a focus on the "agrivalue" sector.
The U of A noted this research is part of the ICON Project, a four-year worldwide collaboration involving 23 partners from 11 countries and sponsored by the European Union.
Several U.S. research projects have recently focused on bringing lesquerella itself directly into crop production, for its seed oil's use in industrial oils and biodiesel additives.
Randall Weselake, a professor at the University of Alberta's department of agricultural, food and nutritional science, has lined up $360,000 for a research team to experiment with seeds from the plant, called lesquerella.
Lesquerella naturally produces high levels of certain fatty acids that are "particularly suited" to production of lubricants and other industrial oils, the university said in a release Friday.
Weselake's team aims to transfer that particular trait into a "canola-like" oilseed plant grown in Canada, the end goal being to produce a "fine liquid wax with superior industrial properties."
If such research pans out, it could "substantially increase the industrial uses of plant oils and serve as a high-performance lubricant," Weselake said in the release Friday.
The canola-like plant in this case would be Brassica carinata, which would be genetically modified using an enzyme from lesquerella, to help convert the plant oils into a liquid wax that's more resistant to high temperatures and pressures than unmodified plant oils, the university said.
Potential applications include automobile transmission fluid, hydraulic fluids, adhesives and numerous industrial lubricants, the university added.
"The overall goal is to decrease reliance on fossil oils currently used in the global chemicals industry," Chris Kazala, manager of the university's BioActive Oils program and a research team member, said in the same release.
"Using plants to produce these products provides a secure, environmentally sustainable supply of these materials for industry and is, in many cases, easier to manufacture."
The funding for the U of A project comes from Avac Ltd., the Calgary-based venture capital fund launched in 1997 by the province with added start-up money from the federal government, to expand value-added industry in Alberta with a focus on the "agrivalue" sector.
The U of A noted this research is part of the ICON Project, a four-year worldwide collaboration involving 23 partners from 11 countries and sponsored by the European Union.
Several U.S. research projects have recently focused on bringing lesquerella itself directly into crop production, for its seed oil's use in industrial oils and biodiesel additives.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Can An Ant Be Employee Of The Month?
[Source: ScienceDaily] - Ants specializing on one job such as snatching food from a picnic are no more efficient than "Jane-of-all-trade" ants, according to new research.
The finding casts doubt on the idea that the world-wide success of ants stems from job specialization within the colony. Ants are found on every continent besides Antarctica.
"The question is, why is job specialization a good thing?" said Anna Dornhaus of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "We thought that the fact that ants have specialists was one of the things that made them so successful and live all over the world in all habitats in great numbers.
"It turns out that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job."
Dornhaus studied the rock ant, known by scientists as Temnothorax albipennis, that lives in cracks in rocks in Europe. In ant colonies, all the workers are females.
She videotaped individual ants as they performed four typical ant tasks: brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for animal protein and nest building. The videotape allowed her to compare how long it took each ant to do a particular task.
Dornhaus, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, is publishing her paper, "Specialization Does Not Predict Individual Efficiency in an Ant," in the Nov. 18 issue of the online journal PLoS Biology. The German Science Foundation (DFG) funded some of the research.
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote in 1776 that specialized labor provided benefits to human industry.
Dornhaus, who studies social insects, wanted to see if this applied to ants because efficiency in ants had rarely been tested.
The workers of rock ants, like those of most ant species, all look the same and do not appear physically specialized for any particular task. Nevertheless, they do specialize.
She expected rock ants that specialized would work more efficiently, but that's not what she found.
To identify the individual workers, which are half the size of a grain of rice, Dornhaus color-coded them with model airplane paint in colors such as rally green and racing red using hair-thin wires as paintbrushes.
She crafted nests for the ants by sandwiching cardboard squares between two glass slides. A tiny tunnel in the cardboard let the ants leave the nest.
Dornhaus tested 1,142 workers from 11 colonies that ranged in size from 27 to 233 workers.
To watch ants in action, Dornhaus put individual colonies in a square arena that was 22 centimeters (about eight-and-half inches) on a side and recorded workers' job performance with two video cameras.
For example, in the brood transport test, she placed a colony and an empty nest 10 centimeters (4 inches) apart. Then she took the roof off the colony's nest by taking off the top slide. Once their nest was destroyed, Dornhaus recorded how long the ants took to find the empty nest and move the eggs and larvae to it.
She measured how often and how readily an individual ant performed each task and considered an ant more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one task.
Dornhaus said some go-getter ants eagerly worked in all of the tasks, but other ants seemed lazy. Although the specialists were not more efficient, they put in more hours of work.
It's not known why ants choose the jobs they do, or why some are slow to begin work.
She said it might be explained by how quickly an individual detects work to be done, like noticing dirty dishes in the sink.
A person with a lower threshold will notice and wash the dishes as soon as there are one or two in the sink. However, a person with a higher threshold doesn't notice the dishes until there are at least 10 piled up. The dishes will still be washed, just not as frequently.
"You get division of labor that way just because they have differences in their sensory systems or somehow in the way they interpret the world without consciously wanting to divide labor," Dornhaus said.
The ability to sense work also varies in ants, she suspects.
Dornhaus found that specialists and generalists work equally fast, but the question of employee of the month is still unanswered.
Even though putting in longer hours might seem like the way to success, it wastes colony resources.
"Speed does matter because every minute they spend outside is dangerous and energy costly," she said. "They burn fuel, and they risk dying."
Her next step is investigating "switching costs," such as the time it takes to walk from one side of the nest to the other or the break in concentration when switching between tasks. Dornhaus suggests specialization might minimize such costs.
"I do science because I think it's cool to find out how the world works, specifically how social insects works," Dornhaus said. "Isn't it cool to know that there are little societies underground everywhere you walk?"
The finding casts doubt on the idea that the world-wide success of ants stems from job specialization within the colony. Ants are found on every continent besides Antarctica.
"The question is, why is job specialization a good thing?" said Anna Dornhaus of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "We thought that the fact that ants have specialists was one of the things that made them so successful and live all over the world in all habitats in great numbers.
"It turns out that the ones that are specialized on a particular job are not particularly good at doing that job."
Dornhaus studied the rock ant, known by scientists as Temnothorax albipennis, that lives in cracks in rocks in Europe. In ant colonies, all the workers are females.
She videotaped individual ants as they performed four typical ant tasks: brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for animal protein and nest building. The videotape allowed her to compare how long it took each ant to do a particular task.
Dornhaus, a UA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, is publishing her paper, "Specialization Does Not Predict Individual Efficiency in an Ant," in the Nov. 18 issue of the online journal PLoS Biology. The German Science Foundation (DFG) funded some of the research.
Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, wrote in 1776 that specialized labor provided benefits to human industry.
Dornhaus, who studies social insects, wanted to see if this applied to ants because efficiency in ants had rarely been tested.
The workers of rock ants, like those of most ant species, all look the same and do not appear physically specialized for any particular task. Nevertheless, they do specialize.
She expected rock ants that specialized would work more efficiently, but that's not what she found.
To identify the individual workers, which are half the size of a grain of rice, Dornhaus color-coded them with model airplane paint in colors such as rally green and racing red using hair-thin wires as paintbrushes.
She crafted nests for the ants by sandwiching cardboard squares between two glass slides. A tiny tunnel in the cardboard let the ants leave the nest.
Dornhaus tested 1,142 workers from 11 colonies that ranged in size from 27 to 233 workers.
To watch ants in action, Dornhaus put individual colonies in a square arena that was 22 centimeters (about eight-and-half inches) on a side and recorded workers' job performance with two video cameras.
For example, in the brood transport test, she placed a colony and an empty nest 10 centimeters (4 inches) apart. Then she took the roof off the colony's nest by taking off the top slide. Once their nest was destroyed, Dornhaus recorded how long the ants took to find the empty nest and move the eggs and larvae to it.
She measured how often and how readily an individual ant performed each task and considered an ant more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one task.
Dornhaus said some go-getter ants eagerly worked in all of the tasks, but other ants seemed lazy. Although the specialists were not more efficient, they put in more hours of work.
It's not known why ants choose the jobs they do, or why some are slow to begin work.
She said it might be explained by how quickly an individual detects work to be done, like noticing dirty dishes in the sink.
A person with a lower threshold will notice and wash the dishes as soon as there are one or two in the sink. However, a person with a higher threshold doesn't notice the dishes until there are at least 10 piled up. The dishes will still be washed, just not as frequently.
"You get division of labor that way just because they have differences in their sensory systems or somehow in the way they interpret the world without consciously wanting to divide labor," Dornhaus said.
The ability to sense work also varies in ants, she suspects.
Dornhaus found that specialists and generalists work equally fast, but the question of employee of the month is still unanswered.
Even though putting in longer hours might seem like the way to success, it wastes colony resources.
"Speed does matter because every minute they spend outside is dangerous and energy costly," she said. "They burn fuel, and they risk dying."
Her next step is investigating "switching costs," such as the time it takes to walk from one side of the nest to the other or the break in concentration when switching between tasks. Dornhaus suggests specialization might minimize such costs.
"I do science because I think it's cool to find out how the world works, specifically how social insects works," Dornhaus said. "Isn't it cool to know that there are little societies underground everywhere you walk?"
Monday, November 17, 2008
UA Researchers Studying Little-Known Genetic Sequences
[Source University Arizona Communications] - University of Arizona researchers are among a group of scientists who have discovered a source of previously scarce small RNA molecules. Their finding, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a valuable new tool for better understanding how plants grow and develop.
All living things contain small RNA molecules, said Vicki Chandler, a UA Regents' Professor and director of the UA's BIO5 Institute. Some small RNA molecules help the genes in cells carry out their instructions, others silence genes and prevent them from acting. In plants, two types of small RNA molecules have been studied, one of them 21 nucleotides long, the other 24 nucleotides long. Nucleotides are the atomic "building blocks" of all genetic material.
Working with a mutant strain of maize, Chandler and her colleagues have honed in on a distinct class of small RNA molecule that is 22 nucleotides long. The 21- and 22-nucleotide RNAs are scarce in most plants, including wild maize, but in the mutant strain, the researchers discovered that they were common because the 24-nucleotide RNAs are dramatically reduced.
Having a reliable source of the 21- and 22-nucleotide RNA means plant biologists can now study these molecules in depth, and work out the pathways they follow to regulate plant genes. "We don't yet know exactly what it (the 22-nucleotide RNA) is doing in the cells, so there'll be a whole new line of experiments as we try to figure it out," Chandler said.
She also said that there may well be other understudied small RNA molecules waiting to be looked at as well. "I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with these small regulatory RNAs. There's still a lot to learn, and that's exciting."
The information that results from studying "new" small RNAs will become doubly valuable as other plant biologists, including BIO5 member Rod Wing, finish refining the genetic sequence of maize. "The two together (the small RNA molecules and the sequenced maize genome) will provide a lot of new tools for better understanding plant growth and function," Chandler said.
That work could ultimately have implications for everything from environmental and ecological issues to agriculture and medicine. "Gene regulation is fundamental to so many issues," Chandler said. The 22-nucleotide RNA molecule, she said "is one example of a pathway that – once it's worked out – could be targeted to address them."
All living things contain small RNA molecules, said Vicki Chandler, a UA Regents' Professor and director of the UA's BIO5 Institute. Some small RNA molecules help the genes in cells carry out their instructions, others silence genes and prevent them from acting. In plants, two types of small RNA molecules have been studied, one of them 21 nucleotides long, the other 24 nucleotides long. Nucleotides are the atomic "building blocks" of all genetic material.
Working with a mutant strain of maize, Chandler and her colleagues have honed in on a distinct class of small RNA molecule that is 22 nucleotides long. The 21- and 22-nucleotide RNAs are scarce in most plants, including wild maize, but in the mutant strain, the researchers discovered that they were common because the 24-nucleotide RNAs are dramatically reduced.
Having a reliable source of the 21- and 22-nucleotide RNA means plant biologists can now study these molecules in depth, and work out the pathways they follow to regulate plant genes. "We don't yet know exactly what it (the 22-nucleotide RNA) is doing in the cells, so there'll be a whole new line of experiments as we try to figure it out," Chandler said.
She also said that there may well be other understudied small RNA molecules waiting to be looked at as well. "I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with these small regulatory RNAs. There's still a lot to learn, and that's exciting."
The information that results from studying "new" small RNAs will become doubly valuable as other plant biologists, including BIO5 member Rod Wing, finish refining the genetic sequence of maize. "The two together (the small RNA molecules and the sequenced maize genome) will provide a lot of new tools for better understanding plant growth and function," Chandler said.
That work could ultimately have implications for everything from environmental and ecological issues to agriculture and medicine. "Gene regulation is fundamental to so many issues," Chandler said. The 22-nucleotide RNA molecule, she said "is one example of a pathway that – once it's worked out – could be targeted to address them."
Monday, November 3, 2008
President Shelton Delivers Keynote Address at IdeaFunding 2008
[Source: Johnny Cruz, University of Arizona Communications] - University of Arizona President Robert N. Shelton reinforced his and the UA's commitment to excellence and innovation during his keynote address at the 2008 IdeaFunding workshop, hosted by the UA's McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.
Shelton's speech came nearly two years to the day after his Inauguration, when he outlined his vision for the UA to be known as one of America's 10 best public research universities.
IdeaFunding is an annual one-day entrepreneurship workshop, designed for individuals interested in bringing a new product or service to market, early stage companies and individuals exploring entrepreneurial new directions.
"I set the University on this course because I believed then, as I do now, that our very future as a research university rests on our capacity to be a top university," Shelton said during his speech. "In this era of heightened competition for dwindling resources, only the best of the best can survive."
Shelton told the attendees that, even during a local and national economic downturn, the UA remains uniquely positioned to achieve its goals and to contribute to a knowledge-based economy.
"It's why we're undergoing our UA Transformation process, to find new and better ways to conduct the business of the modern land-grant university while establishing greater fiscal durability to weather the waxing and waning of our economy," Shelton said. "Amid these times, my confidence in the UA is as high as it has ever been, and that is so because of the quality that sustains us."
Shelton cited several examples of work taking place at the UA that could not be found at any other university, including:
Leadership of the Phoenix Mars Mission, the first mission to Mars led by a public university.
The iPlant Collaborative, a $100 million project awarded to the UA by the National Science Foundation last year.
Unique contributions to health research and education.
Shelton also acknowledged the value of having one of the nation's leading entrepreneurship programs in Tucson and the University's contribution to the economy and quality of life in the region.
"The UA's commitment to community and industry partnership is prepared to not just meet with industry at likely and predictable insertion points, but rather in an ongoing and intimate manner – one that reflects the continual overlap of the knowledge-based economy and the source of knowledge creation and transfer," Shelton said.
Much of the content of IdeaFunding 2008 was devoted to the important first phase of the venture start-up process: idea generation. The workshop explored the five key elements of idea generation: where do ideas come from, making the eventual market your beacon, the role of intellectual property, building a successful team and funding your idea.
The event also featured an address by John May, managing partner of New Vantage Group, and the UA 2008 Anheuser-Busch Angel-in-Residence.
The McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship, established in 1984, is a pioneer in university entrepreneurship. The capstone program, the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program, offers degree and/or associate programs to graduate and undergraduate students from all UA fields of study. The McGuire Center has been consistently ranked in the top 5 percent of all programs since its inception, including No. 2 by Entrepreneur/The Princeton Review and No. 6 globally by Financial Times.
Shelton's speech came nearly two years to the day after his Inauguration, when he outlined his vision for the UA to be known as one of America's 10 best public research universities.
IdeaFunding is an annual one-day entrepreneurship workshop, designed for individuals interested in bringing a new product or service to market, early stage companies and individuals exploring entrepreneurial new directions.
"I set the University on this course because I believed then, as I do now, that our very future as a research university rests on our capacity to be a top university," Shelton said during his speech. "In this era of heightened competition for dwindling resources, only the best of the best can survive."
Shelton told the attendees that, even during a local and national economic downturn, the UA remains uniquely positioned to achieve its goals and to contribute to a knowledge-based economy.
"It's why we're undergoing our UA Transformation process, to find new and better ways to conduct the business of the modern land-grant university while establishing greater fiscal durability to weather the waxing and waning of our economy," Shelton said. "Amid these times, my confidence in the UA is as high as it has ever been, and that is so because of the quality that sustains us."
Shelton cited several examples of work taking place at the UA that could not be found at any other university, including:
Leadership of the Phoenix Mars Mission, the first mission to Mars led by a public university.
The iPlant Collaborative, a $100 million project awarded to the UA by the National Science Foundation last year.
Unique contributions to health research and education.
Shelton also acknowledged the value of having one of the nation's leading entrepreneurship programs in Tucson and the University's contribution to the economy and quality of life in the region.
"The UA's commitment to community and industry partnership is prepared to not just meet with industry at likely and predictable insertion points, but rather in an ongoing and intimate manner – one that reflects the continual overlap of the knowledge-based economy and the source of knowledge creation and transfer," Shelton said.
Much of the content of IdeaFunding 2008 was devoted to the important first phase of the venture start-up process: idea generation. The workshop explored the five key elements of idea generation: where do ideas come from, making the eventual market your beacon, the role of intellectual property, building a successful team and funding your idea.
The event also featured an address by John May, managing partner of New Vantage Group, and the UA 2008 Anheuser-Busch Angel-in-Residence.
The McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship, established in 1984, is a pioneer in university entrepreneurship. The capstone program, the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program, offers degree and/or associate programs to graduate and undergraduate students from all UA fields of study. The McGuire Center has been consistently ranked in the top 5 percent of all programs since its inception, including No. 2 by Entrepreneur/The Princeton Review and No. 6 globally by Financial Times.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Corn Researchers Discover Novel Gene Shut-off Mechanisms
[Source: ScienceDaily] - University of Delaware scientists, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Arizona and South Dakota State University, have identified unusual differences in the natural mechanisms that turn off, or “silence,” genes in corn.
The discovery, which was made by comparing the impact of inactivating a gene that occurs in both corn and in the much-studied laboratory plant Arabidopsis, provides new insight into how one of the world's most important crops protects itself from mutation-causing mobile DNA elements and viruses.
The research was led by Blake Meyers, associate professor of plant and soil sciences, and Pamela Green, Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and professor of plant and soil sciences and marine bioscience, and their laboratory groups at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, a major center for biotechnology and life sciences research at the University of Delaware.
Collaborating with the University of Delaware team were Vicki Chandler, the Carl E. and Patricia Weiler Endowed Chair for Excellence in Agriculture and Life Sciences Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona, and Yang Yen, a professor at South Dakota State University.
The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Studies of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant of the mustard family that is easy to grow in the lab, have provided a lot of what scientists know about gene silencing in plants.
An important key to the process is short sequences of ribonucleic acids known as “small RNAs” which act like biochemical switches that shut off genes, thus playing a fundamental role in plant development. Understanding how small RNAs work is a continuing quest for geneticists seeking to breed plants with improved crop yields, disease resistance and other characteristics.
Previously, the Meyers and Green labs had studied Arabidopsis plants with nonfunctional versions of a gene known as RNA-dependent RNA polymerase 2 (RDR2). Without an active copy of this gene, the plants were unable to produce a major class of small RNAs, which act to stabilize and protect genes on the chromosomes.
In that prior work, Meyers and Green took advantage of the nonfunctional gene to study microRNAs, an interesting type of small RNA that is usually “masked” by the major class of small RNAs produced by RDR2.
Independently of the UD groups, Chandler and her team at the University of Arizona had identified from corn an orthologous gene--a gene that has the same function in different organisms. In corn, this gene, which the Chandler lab found, is called the mediator of paramutation (MOP1). Its equivalent in Arabidopsis is the RDR2 gene.
Because the RDR2 and MOP1 genes should both produce the “protective” set of small RNAs, the research groups decided to collaborate to see if the small RNAs in corn behave the same way they do in Arabidopsis. The hypothesis was that the result would be the same in the two plant species, and the lab groups could use the MOP1 corn plants to focus their studies on the harder-to-examine microRNAs, as they had done previously in Arabidopsis.
“Yet we found something that had not been observed before in this plant--an odd class of small RNAs,” Meyers said. “I think it's pretty neat to work in a more complex system like corn and see things that Arabidopsis hadn't shown us,” he noted.
Using a technique known as sequencing by synthesis (SBS), provided by Illumina in Hayward, Calif., coupled with state-of-the-art bioinformatics in Meyers' lab, the research team found that the MOP1 and RDR2 genes are not fully equivalent based on an assessment of small RNA complexity.
The researchers found that there are lots more RNAs of an unusual class known as “small interfering RNAs” in corn than there are in Arabidopsis.
“This class of RNAs mainly functions to repress repetitive sequences, including mobile DNA elements called transposons,” Meyers said. “Thus, small interfering RNAs act to protect the genome,” he noted.
“Corn contains an extra layer of protective small RNAs that had not been observed in Arabidopsis, so there must be additional genes other than MOP1 that produce this,” Meyers said.
The scientific community is sequencing the corn genome now, Meyers said. Once the genome is available, the work of matching up small RNAs to specific traits in corn will be much easier, he noted.
“This research is helping us to better understand the biology of corn--one of the most important plants in the world--and gives us new avenues for exploring a novel class of small RNAs,” Meyers said.
The discovery, which was made by comparing the impact of inactivating a gene that occurs in both corn and in the much-studied laboratory plant Arabidopsis, provides new insight into how one of the world's most important crops protects itself from mutation-causing mobile DNA elements and viruses.
The research was led by Blake Meyers, associate professor of plant and soil sciences, and Pamela Green, Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and professor of plant and soil sciences and marine bioscience, and their laboratory groups at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, a major center for biotechnology and life sciences research at the University of Delaware.
Collaborating with the University of Delaware team were Vicki Chandler, the Carl E. and Patricia Weiler Endowed Chair for Excellence in Agriculture and Life Sciences Regents' Professor at the University of Arizona, and Yang Yen, a professor at South Dakota State University.
The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Studies of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant of the mustard family that is easy to grow in the lab, have provided a lot of what scientists know about gene silencing in plants.
An important key to the process is short sequences of ribonucleic acids known as “small RNAs” which act like biochemical switches that shut off genes, thus playing a fundamental role in plant development. Understanding how small RNAs work is a continuing quest for geneticists seeking to breed plants with improved crop yields, disease resistance and other characteristics.
Previously, the Meyers and Green labs had studied Arabidopsis plants with nonfunctional versions of a gene known as RNA-dependent RNA polymerase 2 (RDR2). Without an active copy of this gene, the plants were unable to produce a major class of small RNAs, which act to stabilize and protect genes on the chromosomes.
In that prior work, Meyers and Green took advantage of the nonfunctional gene to study microRNAs, an interesting type of small RNA that is usually “masked” by the major class of small RNAs produced by RDR2.
Independently of the UD groups, Chandler and her team at the University of Arizona had identified from corn an orthologous gene--a gene that has the same function in different organisms. In corn, this gene, which the Chandler lab found, is called the mediator of paramutation (MOP1). Its equivalent in Arabidopsis is the RDR2 gene.
Because the RDR2 and MOP1 genes should both produce the “protective” set of small RNAs, the research groups decided to collaborate to see if the small RNAs in corn behave the same way they do in Arabidopsis. The hypothesis was that the result would be the same in the two plant species, and the lab groups could use the MOP1 corn plants to focus their studies on the harder-to-examine microRNAs, as they had done previously in Arabidopsis.
“Yet we found something that had not been observed before in this plant--an odd class of small RNAs,” Meyers said. “I think it's pretty neat to work in a more complex system like corn and see things that Arabidopsis hadn't shown us,” he noted.
Using a technique known as sequencing by synthesis (SBS), provided by Illumina in Hayward, Calif., coupled with state-of-the-art bioinformatics in Meyers' lab, the research team found that the MOP1 and RDR2 genes are not fully equivalent based on an assessment of small RNA complexity.
The researchers found that there are lots more RNAs of an unusual class known as “small interfering RNAs” in corn than there are in Arabidopsis.
“This class of RNAs mainly functions to repress repetitive sequences, including mobile DNA elements called transposons,” Meyers said. “Thus, small interfering RNAs act to protect the genome,” he noted.
“Corn contains an extra layer of protective small RNAs that had not been observed in Arabidopsis, so there must be additional genes other than MOP1 that produce this,” Meyers said.
The scientific community is sequencing the corn genome now, Meyers said. Once the genome is available, the work of matching up small RNAs to specific traits in corn will be much easier, he noted.
“This research is helping us to better understand the biology of corn--one of the most important plants in the world--and gives us new avenues for exploring a novel class of small RNAs,” Meyers said.
SMCC receives $290,000 grant
[Source: The Arizona Republic] - The South Mountain Community College for Agriculture and Bioscience Education was awarded a $290,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The three-year Expanding Undergraduate Bioscience Engagement Track (eUBET) grant gives students a chance to conduct biotechnology research projects and publicly present their works. Students in advanced eUBET biotechnology classes conduct rigorous genomics research by mapping genes and publishing. South Mountain is at 7050 S. 24th St.
eUBET is also designed to increase minority-student access to bioscience education and employment and to overcome barriers for high schools to teach biosciences.
The grant will provide partner high schools with a customized package of resources that may include: bioscience laboratory instruments, bioscience training for high school science teachers, college bioscience curricula for the high schools to teach dual enrollment bioscience courses through SMCC, science lab-technician support, lab supplies, student research project materials, student paid internships and science-fair fees.
Partner schools are Phoenix Bioscience High School, Tempe High School, Marcos de Niza High School, Mesa High School's Biotechnology Academy, Corona Del Sol, Carl Hayden Community High School and Arizona Agribusiness & Equine Center.
The three-year Expanding Undergraduate Bioscience Engagement Track (eUBET) grant gives students a chance to conduct biotechnology research projects and publicly present their works. Students in advanced eUBET biotechnology classes conduct rigorous genomics research by mapping genes and publishing. South Mountain is at 7050 S. 24th St.
eUBET is also designed to increase minority-student access to bioscience education and employment and to overcome barriers for high schools to teach biosciences.
The grant will provide partner high schools with a customized package of resources that may include: bioscience laboratory instruments, bioscience training for high school science teachers, college bioscience curricula for the high schools to teach dual enrollment bioscience courses through SMCC, science lab-technician support, lab supplies, student research project materials, student paid internships and science-fair fees.
Partner schools are Phoenix Bioscience High School, Tempe High School, Marcos de Niza High School, Mesa High School's Biotechnology Academy, Corona Del Sol, Carl Hayden Community High School and Arizona Agribusiness & Equine Center.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
NSF Grants Nearly $60M for Plant Genome Research Program Awards
Source: GenomeWeb News, a GenomeWeb staff reporter ] - The National Science Foundation has injected $57.3 million into plant genomics studies across the country, and to several international recipients, covering a wide variety of plant life, such as legumes, soil microbes, flower nectar, mutant plants, and other crops.
This round of Plant Genome Research Program studies, in the eleventh year of the program, range from $350,000 to $6.8 million, and vary from two to five years in duration.
These grants will support tool development to advance genomics studies, and the studies will use sequence and functional genomics resources to investigate gene function and interactions between genomes and the environment. These programs will emphasize studies of crop plants that are economically useful such as corn, soybean, wheat, and rice, NSF said.
"Plant biologists continue to make significant conceptual and theoretical advances in our understanding of basic biological processes using plants," James Collins, NSF assistant director for biological sciences, said in a statement. "The latest projects funded through the PGRP reflect this shift and will integrate innovative, cutting edge research with the training of the next generation of plant scientists at both research universities and small teaching colleges and universities.”
These awards will be spread out among a total of 45 institutions in 28 states, and they will support international scientists in Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America. The grants were focused on funding research partnerships between two or more institutions, for example: The University of California, Davis, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Kansas State University will use $6.8 million to conduct physical mapping of the Wheat D genome. The J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive $3.8 million to curate the genome of the Medicago truncatula, a legume from the Mediterranean regions commonly used in biology. The University of Southern California and the University of California, Davis, will study the same legume, and will receive $3.2 million to conduct community genomics research into local adaptation of the plant. The University of Arizona and the University of Missouri, Columbia, will use $4.3 million to study comparative functional genomic and proteomic analysis of rhizome specificity across the plant kingdom.
A complete list of the NSF’s PGCSP funding recipients for 2008, and previous years, is available here.
This round of Plant Genome Research Program studies, in the eleventh year of the program, range from $350,000 to $6.8 million, and vary from two to five years in duration.
These grants will support tool development to advance genomics studies, and the studies will use sequence and functional genomics resources to investigate gene function and interactions between genomes and the environment. These programs will emphasize studies of crop plants that are economically useful such as corn, soybean, wheat, and rice, NSF said.
"Plant biologists continue to make significant conceptual and theoretical advances in our understanding of basic biological processes using plants," James Collins, NSF assistant director for biological sciences, said in a statement. "The latest projects funded through the PGRP reflect this shift and will integrate innovative, cutting edge research with the training of the next generation of plant scientists at both research universities and small teaching colleges and universities.”
These awards will be spread out among a total of 45 institutions in 28 states, and they will support international scientists in Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America. The grants were focused on funding research partnerships between two or more institutions, for example: The University of California, Davis, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and Kansas State University will use $6.8 million to conduct physical mapping of the Wheat D genome. The J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive $3.8 million to curate the genome of the Medicago truncatula, a legume from the Mediterranean regions commonly used in biology. The University of Southern California and the University of California, Davis, will study the same legume, and will receive $3.2 million to conduct community genomics research into local adaptation of the plant. The University of Arizona and the University of Missouri, Columbia, will use $4.3 million to study comparative functional genomic and proteomic analysis of rhizome specificity across the plant kingdom.
A complete list of the NSF’s PGCSP funding recipients for 2008, and previous years, is available here.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Diatom Genome Helps Explain Their Great Diversity and Success in Trapping Excess Carbon in Oceans
[Source: Deborah Daun, BIO5] - Diatoms, mighty microscopic algae, have profound influence on climate, producing 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe by capturing atmospheric carbon and in so doing, countering the greenhouse effect. Since their evolutionary origins these photosynthetic wonders have come to acquire advantageous genes from bacterial, animal and plant ancestors enabling them to thrive in today’s oceans. These findings, based on the analysis of the latest sequenced diatom genome, Phaeodactylum tricornutum, are published in the October 15, 2008 edition of the journal Nature by an international team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris. The research team includes Carolyn Napoli, PhD, a research professor with the BIO5 Institute; and Rich Jorgensen, PhD, professor of plant sciences at The University of Arizona.
The researchers compared Phaeodactylum with the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana, previously sequenced by DOE JGI, revealing a wealth of information about diatom biology, particularly the rapid diversification among the hundreds of thousands of diatom species that exist today. Phaeodactylum was targeted for sequencing due to its value as a diatom model, given the ease with which it can be grown in the lab and the availability of tools to genetically transform it, and the comparisons with the previously sequenced diatom genome of Thalassiosira pseudonana.
“These organisms represent a veritable melting pot of traits—a hybrid of genetic mechanisms contributed by ancestral lineages of plants, animals, and bacteria, and optimized over the relatively short evolutionary timeframe of 180 million years since they first appeared,” says first author Chris Bowler of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. “Our findings show that gene transfer between diatoms and other organisms has been extremely common, making diatoms ‘transgenic by nature’,” he adds.
The wholesale acquisition of genetic material has provided food for thought to researchers bent on characterizing the diatom’s staying power and ability to cope with environmental change.
“We believe this is the first time bacterial horizontal gene transfer has been observed in eukaryotes at such scale,” says senior author Igor Grigoriev of DOE JGI. “This study gets us closer to explaining the dramatic diversity across the genera of diatoms, morphologically, behaviorally, but we still haven’t yet explained all the differences conferred by the genes contributed by the other taxa.”
From plants, the diatom inherited photosynthesis, and from animals the production of urea. Bowler speculates that the diatom uses urea to store nitrogen, not to eliminate it like animals do, because nitrogen is a precious nutrient in the ocean. What’s more, the tiny alga draws the best of both worlds—it can convert fat into sugar, as well as sugar into fat—extremely useful in times of nutrient shortage.
The team documented more than 300 genes sourced from bacteria and found in both types of diatoms, pointing to their ancient origin and suggesting novel mechanisms of managing nutrients—for example utilization of organic carbon and nitrogen—and detecting cues from their environment.
Diatoms, encapsulated by elaborate lacework-like shells made of glass, are only about one-third of a strand of hair in diameter. “The diatom genomes will help us to understand how they can make these structures at ambient temperatures and pressures, something that humans are not able to do. If we can learn how they do it, we could open up all kinds of new nanotechnologies, like for building miniature silicon chips or for biomedical applications,” says Bowler.
Diatoms reside in fresh or salt water and can be divided into two camps, centrics and pennates. The centric Thalassiosira resemble a round “Camembert” cheese box (only much smaller) and pennates like Phaeodactylum look more like a cross between a boomerang and a narrow three-cornered hat—hence the species name, tricornutum. Not only is their shape and habitat diverse, so too is their behavior; for instance, the former get around by floating, the latter by gliding through the water or on surfaces.
The lifestyle of diatoms can be characterized as “bloom or bust.” When light and nutrient conditions in the upper reaches of the ocean are favorable, particularly at the onset of spring, diatoms gain an edge and tend to dominate their phytoplankton brethren. When food is scarce, they die and sink, carrying their complement of carbon dioxide to the deeper recesses.
Bowler and his colleagues are also trying to understand the role that iron plays in the Phaeodactylum’s development. Iron is even more precious than nitrogen in the ocean and its absence in the southern hemisphere is likely a major cause of oceanic deserts of photosynthesis there. Bowler’s team has demonstrated that when iron deficiency occurs processes such as photosynthesis and nitrogen assimilation are suppressed. Other studies, which hail diatoms as champions in capturing carbon dioxide, suggest a bold strategy of using iron as a fertilizer to provoke massive diatom blooms. “Once they have feasted, the weight of their silicon shells, which resemble glass, causes the diatoms to sink to the bottom of the ocean when they die, and the carbon that they assimilated is trapped there for millennia,” says Bowler. “By sequestering carbon in this way we could reverse the damage from the burning of fossil fuels.”
Other DOE JGI authors on the Nature study include Alan Kuo, Robert Otillar, Asaf Salamov, Chris Detter, Erika Lindquist, Susan Lucas, Harris Shapiro, Daniel Rokhsar, and Igor Grigoriev as well as Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of JGI at the HudsonAlpha Institute.
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by the DOE Office of Science, unites the expertise of five national laboratories -- Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest -- along with the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology -- to advance genomics in support of the DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. DOE JGI’s Walnut Creek, CA, Production Genomics Facility provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges.
The researchers compared Phaeodactylum with the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana, previously sequenced by DOE JGI, revealing a wealth of information about diatom biology, particularly the rapid diversification among the hundreds of thousands of diatom species that exist today. Phaeodactylum was targeted for sequencing due to its value as a diatom model, given the ease with which it can be grown in the lab and the availability of tools to genetically transform it, and the comparisons with the previously sequenced diatom genome of Thalassiosira pseudonana.
“These organisms represent a veritable melting pot of traits—a hybrid of genetic mechanisms contributed by ancestral lineages of plants, animals, and bacteria, and optimized over the relatively short evolutionary timeframe of 180 million years since they first appeared,” says first author Chris Bowler of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. “Our findings show that gene transfer between diatoms and other organisms has been extremely common, making diatoms ‘transgenic by nature’,” he adds.
The wholesale acquisition of genetic material has provided food for thought to researchers bent on characterizing the diatom’s staying power and ability to cope with environmental change.
“We believe this is the first time bacterial horizontal gene transfer has been observed in eukaryotes at such scale,” says senior author Igor Grigoriev of DOE JGI. “This study gets us closer to explaining the dramatic diversity across the genera of diatoms, morphologically, behaviorally, but we still haven’t yet explained all the differences conferred by the genes contributed by the other taxa.”
From plants, the diatom inherited photosynthesis, and from animals the production of urea. Bowler speculates that the diatom uses urea to store nitrogen, not to eliminate it like animals do, because nitrogen is a precious nutrient in the ocean. What’s more, the tiny alga draws the best of both worlds—it can convert fat into sugar, as well as sugar into fat—extremely useful in times of nutrient shortage.
The team documented more than 300 genes sourced from bacteria and found in both types of diatoms, pointing to their ancient origin and suggesting novel mechanisms of managing nutrients—for example utilization of organic carbon and nitrogen—and detecting cues from their environment.
Diatoms, encapsulated by elaborate lacework-like shells made of glass, are only about one-third of a strand of hair in diameter. “The diatom genomes will help us to understand how they can make these structures at ambient temperatures and pressures, something that humans are not able to do. If we can learn how they do it, we could open up all kinds of new nanotechnologies, like for building miniature silicon chips or for biomedical applications,” says Bowler.
Diatoms reside in fresh or salt water and can be divided into two camps, centrics and pennates. The centric Thalassiosira resemble a round “Camembert” cheese box (only much smaller) and pennates like Phaeodactylum look more like a cross between a boomerang and a narrow three-cornered hat—hence the species name, tricornutum. Not only is their shape and habitat diverse, so too is their behavior; for instance, the former get around by floating, the latter by gliding through the water or on surfaces.
The lifestyle of diatoms can be characterized as “bloom or bust.” When light and nutrient conditions in the upper reaches of the ocean are favorable, particularly at the onset of spring, diatoms gain an edge and tend to dominate their phytoplankton brethren. When food is scarce, they die and sink, carrying their complement of carbon dioxide to the deeper recesses.
Bowler and his colleagues are also trying to understand the role that iron plays in the Phaeodactylum’s development. Iron is even more precious than nitrogen in the ocean and its absence in the southern hemisphere is likely a major cause of oceanic deserts of photosynthesis there. Bowler’s team has demonstrated that when iron deficiency occurs processes such as photosynthesis and nitrogen assimilation are suppressed. Other studies, which hail diatoms as champions in capturing carbon dioxide, suggest a bold strategy of using iron as a fertilizer to provoke massive diatom blooms. “Once they have feasted, the weight of their silicon shells, which resemble glass, causes the diatoms to sink to the bottom of the ocean when they die, and the carbon that they assimilated is trapped there for millennia,” says Bowler. “By sequestering carbon in this way we could reverse the damage from the burning of fossil fuels.”
Other DOE JGI authors on the Nature study include Alan Kuo, Robert Otillar, Asaf Salamov, Chris Detter, Erika Lindquist, Susan Lucas, Harris Shapiro, Daniel Rokhsar, and Igor Grigoriev as well as Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of JGI at the HudsonAlpha Institute.
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, supported by the DOE Office of Science, unites the expertise of five national laboratories -- Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest -- along with the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology -- to advance genomics in support of the DOE missions related to clean energy generation and environmental characterization and cleanup. DOE JGI’s Walnut Creek, CA, Production Genomics Facility provides integrated high-throughput sequencing and computational analysis that enable systems-based scientific approaches to these challenges.
UA researchers are finding a new way to reduce food-borne illness in humans
[Source: Susan McGinley, UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences] - Most people are familiar with Salmonella and its potential to make people ill. But fewer know about Campylobacter jejuni – even though it makes more people sick. Raw chicken is one of the most common carriers of the bacteria, often encountered when cooked meat is placed on unwashed cutting boards previously used for trimming raw chicken, or when chicken is not cooked to 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Campylobacter is now the No. 1 food-borne pathogen in the United States and the world, surpassing Salmonella," said Lynn Joens, a professor in The University of Arizona department of veterinary science and microbiology and a BIO5 member. "In the United States alone, 2.4 million cases are reported annually, with costs exceeding $1 billion."
A new poultry vaccine in development at the UA offers a unique approach in controlling Campylobacter jejuni infection in chickens before it reaches the dinner table. In research trials the vaccine has significantly reduced the pathogen's ability to colonize young chickens' intestines, where the infection begins. The goal is to halt the contamination before it spreads and survives on raw chicken sold in stores.
"Yet chickens don't actually cause the disease (nor does it make them ill). It's the organism they carry that makes people sick," Joens said. "Right now you can go to any grocery store, get a raw chicken, test it in a laboratory and find Campylobacter jejuni. Twenty to 80 percent of all broiler houses become contaminated with Campylobacter."
The most common symptoms of human Campylobacter poisoning, which mimic those of Salmonella and other gastrointestinal pathogens, include fever, cramps, watery diarrhea and sometimes dysentery. More severe infections can lead to peritonitis, autoimmune disease or death.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Joens and UA graduate students started analyzing Campylobacter's infection process about four years ago, looking for a way to interrupt it. The laboratory team, which included graduate research associate James Theoret and assistant research professor Bibiana Law, eventually discovered that the pathogen first attached itself to the surface of the chick's intestines and then began to multiply. Attacking the "sticking" mechanism seemed to be the key.
When the UA researchers sequenced the intestinal surface protein they identified the gene responsible for producing Campylobacter’s adherence protein. Then they built a trial vaccine around it using Salmonella bacteria as a vector, with the assistance of Roy Curtiss, professor and director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University. Curtiss’ group inserted the adherence gene into Salmonella bacteria, which is nonpathogenic for poultry. The resulting live vaccine – containing Salmonella programmed to make the Campylobacter adhering protein – was fed to young chickens to protect them.
“Once the Salmonella in the vaccine produced the Campylobacter protein, the chicks made antibodies against it in their intestines,” Joens says. "In our first study of 15 birds we got a very significant reduction – 98 percent – in Campylobacter infection, compared with a control group. We're now repeating the trial on a larger scale."
The vaccination process is simple, easy to produce and protective to the chick, according to Joens. The Salmonella lives four to five days, enough time to stimulate antibody production, and dies. Chickens need to be vaccinated early because they become infected at just two to three weeks of age.
Joens' preliminary figures show that 270 million Campylobacter organisms were present in non-vaccinated birds, compared with 67,000 organisms in the vaccinated birds.
"You need at least 500 organisms to produce disease in humans," he explained. "The chlorine in the packinghouse chillers usually reduces numbers of bacteria by 1,000 to 100,000 organisms, so the chickens should be free of Campylobacter after processing."
The UA group was the first to discover the adherence protein, which is only produced when Campylobacter jejuni colonizes certain surfaces, like chicken intestine and skin. They have a patent pending in both the United States and the European Union for the gene that produces it.
"If everything goes right we could have a commercial vaccine in three to five years," Joens said. The vaccine's effect could be significant: About 8.9 billion broilers go to market annually in the U.S., with a value of $21.5 billion. Europe has similar broiler production figures. Americans consumed 86 pounds of chicken per person in 2006, the most recent numbers available.
"The vaccine would be a great intervention method for Campylobacter when the USDA and FDA (Food and Drug Administration) mandate reduced numbers of food-borne pathogens in chicken – probably in two to three years," Joens said. "Once it becomes available, the vaccine should cost about a penny per chick. More importantly, it should greatly reduce the number of cases of human Campylobacter gastroenteritis."
"Campylobacter is now the No. 1 food-borne pathogen in the United States and the world, surpassing Salmonella," said Lynn Joens, a professor in The University of Arizona department of veterinary science and microbiology and a BIO5 member. "In the United States alone, 2.4 million cases are reported annually, with costs exceeding $1 billion."
A new poultry vaccine in development at the UA offers a unique approach in controlling Campylobacter jejuni infection in chickens before it reaches the dinner table. In research trials the vaccine has significantly reduced the pathogen's ability to colonize young chickens' intestines, where the infection begins. The goal is to halt the contamination before it spreads and survives on raw chicken sold in stores.
"Yet chickens don't actually cause the disease (nor does it make them ill). It's the organism they carry that makes people sick," Joens said. "Right now you can go to any grocery store, get a raw chicken, test it in a laboratory and find Campylobacter jejuni. Twenty to 80 percent of all broiler houses become contaminated with Campylobacter."
The most common symptoms of human Campylobacter poisoning, which mimic those of Salmonella and other gastrointestinal pathogens, include fever, cramps, watery diarrhea and sometimes dysentery. More severe infections can lead to peritonitis, autoimmune disease or death.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Joens and UA graduate students started analyzing Campylobacter's infection process about four years ago, looking for a way to interrupt it. The laboratory team, which included graduate research associate James Theoret and assistant research professor Bibiana Law, eventually discovered that the pathogen first attached itself to the surface of the chick's intestines and then began to multiply. Attacking the "sticking" mechanism seemed to be the key.
When the UA researchers sequenced the intestinal surface protein they identified the gene responsible for producing Campylobacter’s adherence protein. Then they built a trial vaccine around it using Salmonella bacteria as a vector, with the assistance of Roy Curtiss, professor and director of the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University. Curtiss’ group inserted the adherence gene into Salmonella bacteria, which is nonpathogenic for poultry. The resulting live vaccine – containing Salmonella programmed to make the Campylobacter adhering protein – was fed to young chickens to protect them.
“Once the Salmonella in the vaccine produced the Campylobacter protein, the chicks made antibodies against it in their intestines,” Joens says. "In our first study of 15 birds we got a very significant reduction – 98 percent – in Campylobacter infection, compared with a control group. We're now repeating the trial on a larger scale."
The vaccination process is simple, easy to produce and protective to the chick, according to Joens. The Salmonella lives four to five days, enough time to stimulate antibody production, and dies. Chickens need to be vaccinated early because they become infected at just two to three weeks of age.
Joens' preliminary figures show that 270 million Campylobacter organisms were present in non-vaccinated birds, compared with 67,000 organisms in the vaccinated birds.
"You need at least 500 organisms to produce disease in humans," he explained. "The chlorine in the packinghouse chillers usually reduces numbers of bacteria by 1,000 to 100,000 organisms, so the chickens should be free of Campylobacter after processing."
The UA group was the first to discover the adherence protein, which is only produced when Campylobacter jejuni colonizes certain surfaces, like chicken intestine and skin. They have a patent pending in both the United States and the European Union for the gene that produces it.
"If everything goes right we could have a commercial vaccine in three to five years," Joens said. The vaccine's effect could be significant: About 8.9 billion broilers go to market annually in the U.S., with a value of $21.5 billion. Europe has similar broiler production figures. Americans consumed 86 pounds of chicken per person in 2006, the most recent numbers available.
"The vaccine would be a great intervention method for Campylobacter when the USDA and FDA (Food and Drug Administration) mandate reduced numbers of food-borne pathogens in chicken – probably in two to three years," Joens said. "Once it becomes available, the vaccine should cost about a penny per chick. More importantly, it should greatly reduce the number of cases of human Campylobacter gastroenteritis."
Caste in the colony
[Source: EurkaAlert] - "The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms…the exploitation of one part of society by the other". – Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Although diversity in social groups can increase group well being, it also may increase the potential for conflict. All societies are characterized by struggles for control: which individuals gain the spoils and which toil in the fields. In colonies of social insects this struggle is embodied by a reproductive division of labor. Some individuals (the queens) reproduce, while the workers provide the labor that maintains colony function. In many social insects queens enjoy nearly complete control over reproduction and workers have diversified in form and function to increase their efficiency at performing different labors.
How, then, is it determined which individuals, as developing larvae, becoming queens or different types of workers? A collaborative research team of scientists at four universities has found that caste determination in the Florida harvester ant is much more than meets the eye. Larvae become different castes (small workers, large workers, or new queens) based largely on the nutrition they receive. Those fed more insects than seeds are more likely to become larger individuals (queen>large worker>small worker). However, genetic differences also contribute and bias the larva's developmental pathway. Even once caste is determined, nutritional, social (colony size), and genetic factors all contribute, but in different ways, to how big an individual grows. "Caste determination in most social insects likely involves both nature and nurture, but most interestingly in this species, these two forces contribute differently in different castes," says lead researcher Chris R. Smith of the University of Illinois. Although genetic factors contribute to what caste an individual becomes, the environment of the larva is controlled by the workers. Quite generally, ant colonies are supreme examples of both conflict and cooperation – each extreme of the nature-nurture continuum.
###
"Caste determination in a polymorphic social insect: nutritional, social, and genetic factors" by C.R. Smith (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), K.E. Anderson (University of Arizona), C.V. Tillberg (Linfield College), J. Gadau (Arizona State University), and A.V. Suarez (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). American Naturalist (2008) 172:497-507 DOI: 10.1086/590961
Although diversity in social groups can increase group well being, it also may increase the potential for conflict. All societies are characterized by struggles for control: which individuals gain the spoils and which toil in the fields. In colonies of social insects this struggle is embodied by a reproductive division of labor. Some individuals (the queens) reproduce, while the workers provide the labor that maintains colony function. In many social insects queens enjoy nearly complete control over reproduction and workers have diversified in form and function to increase their efficiency at performing different labors.
How, then, is it determined which individuals, as developing larvae, becoming queens or different types of workers? A collaborative research team of scientists at four universities has found that caste determination in the Florida harvester ant is much more than meets the eye. Larvae become different castes (small workers, large workers, or new queens) based largely on the nutrition they receive. Those fed more insects than seeds are more likely to become larger individuals (queen>large worker>small worker). However, genetic differences also contribute and bias the larva's developmental pathway. Even once caste is determined, nutritional, social (colony size), and genetic factors all contribute, but in different ways, to how big an individual grows. "Caste determination in most social insects likely involves both nature and nurture, but most interestingly in this species, these two forces contribute differently in different castes," says lead researcher Chris R. Smith of the University of Illinois. Although genetic factors contribute to what caste an individual becomes, the environment of the larva is controlled by the workers. Quite generally, ant colonies are supreme examples of both conflict and cooperation – each extreme of the nature-nurture continuum.
###
"Caste determination in a polymorphic social insect: nutritional, social, and genetic factors" by C.R. Smith (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), K.E. Anderson (University of Arizona), C.V. Tillberg (Linfield College), J. Gadau (Arizona State University), and A.V. Suarez (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). American Naturalist (2008) 172:497-507 DOI: 10.1086/590961
Friday, October 17, 2008
Lichens Function As Indicators Of Nitrogen Pollution In Forests
[Source; ScienceDaily ] - Scientists have found lichens can give insight into nitrogen air pollution effects on Sierra Nevada and San Bernardino mountain ecosystems, and protecting them provides safeguards for less sensitive species.
Their findings are presented this month in the international journal Environmental Pollution and are significant because nitrogen from air pollution causes detrimental chemical and biological effects to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Other harmful effects include elevated nitrate concentrations in streams and groundwater, and weakened California forests more susceptible to bark beetle infestations and fires.
The U.S. Forest Service funded the study, which included the agency's own researchers working with scientists at the University of Arizona and Spain's National Research Center for Energy, Environment and Technology.
According to the scientists, nitrogen pollution that has virtually eliminated lichen species in the Los Angeles Basin and San Bernardino Mountains is now exceeding critical loads over much of the Western Sierra Nevada as far north as Lake Tahoe. Other areas in corridors of polluted air such as the Central Valley are also exceeding nitrogen critical loads.
"Publicity surrounds the carbon cycle and its effects on the environment, but humans have altered the global nitrogen cycle to a greater degree," said Mark Fenn, a Forest Service plant pathologist and one of the study's authors. "There are now significant changes in lichen indicator groups because nitrogen critical loads are being exceeded over much of California."
Scientists involved in the research studied 24 mixed-conifer forest sites exposed to a wide range of atmospheric nitrogen deposition and monitored adverse changes in lichens, among the most sensitive biological indicators of nitrogen effects.
The result is a useful tool for determining critical loads and preventing broader impacts to forests. Protecting lichens also has inherent value because of their complex hydrological, nutrient cycling, wildlife forage and nesting material roles.
"Quantifying nitrogen critical loads helps land managers determine the point at which unacceptable impacts occur to sensitive ecosystems," Fenn said. "This helps bring air quality management that is more firmly rooted in ecosystem protection."
The United Nations' International Cooperative Program on Effects of Air Pollution on Natural Vegetation and Crops has led the largest effort to quantify nitrogen critical loads. Similar coordinated efforts do not exist in the United States. But, U.S. research in critical loads is increasing.
Their findings are presented this month in the international journal Environmental Pollution and are significant because nitrogen from air pollution causes detrimental chemical and biological effects to terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Other harmful effects include elevated nitrate concentrations in streams and groundwater, and weakened California forests more susceptible to bark beetle infestations and fires.
The U.S. Forest Service funded the study, which included the agency's own researchers working with scientists at the University of Arizona and Spain's National Research Center for Energy, Environment and Technology.
According to the scientists, nitrogen pollution that has virtually eliminated lichen species in the Los Angeles Basin and San Bernardino Mountains is now exceeding critical loads over much of the Western Sierra Nevada as far north as Lake Tahoe. Other areas in corridors of polluted air such as the Central Valley are also exceeding nitrogen critical loads.
"Publicity surrounds the carbon cycle and its effects on the environment, but humans have altered the global nitrogen cycle to a greater degree," said Mark Fenn, a Forest Service plant pathologist and one of the study's authors. "There are now significant changes in lichen indicator groups because nitrogen critical loads are being exceeded over much of California."
Scientists involved in the research studied 24 mixed-conifer forest sites exposed to a wide range of atmospheric nitrogen deposition and monitored adverse changes in lichens, among the most sensitive biological indicators of nitrogen effects.
The result is a useful tool for determining critical loads and preventing broader impacts to forests. Protecting lichens also has inherent value because of their complex hydrological, nutrient cycling, wildlife forage and nesting material roles.
"Quantifying nitrogen critical loads helps land managers determine the point at which unacceptable impacts occur to sensitive ecosystems," Fenn said. "This helps bring air quality management that is more firmly rooted in ecosystem protection."
The United Nations' International Cooperative Program on Effects of Air Pollution on Natural Vegetation and Crops has led the largest effort to quantify nitrogen critical loads. Similar coordinated efforts do not exist in the United States. But, U.S. research in critical loads is increasing.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
From Jellyfish to Plants to Everything Alive: How a Magic Marker Altered Bioscience
[Source; Deb Daun, BIO5] - In a fortunate stroke of collaboration, a University of Arizona scientist has helped transform the Nobel-prize winning idea of marking cells with the bright green glow of a jellyfish into a basic tool of modern bioscience.
Plant Sciences Professor and BIO5 member David Galbraith, PhD, said today that he felt a personal attachment to the Nobel Prize given on Wednesday to Martin Chalfie and two others. The prize honored Chalfie’s paper in 1994 that showed how to use the jellyfish’s glow—caused by a Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP, gene in its DNA—to mark a worm’s nerve cells.
With days of the publication of that paper, Galbraith, working in Arizona, was struck by an idea. That marker could become a much larger breakthrough for researchers trying to study cells in organs where individual cells were difficult, often impossible, to separate out and analyze.
”I read the jellyfish paper, and right away I thought, we should put that to use in plant cells,” Galbraith said.
Galbraith asked Chalfie to help him put the GFP gene to immediate use. Chalfie sent him samples of the DNA that encodes the green fluorescence, and some encouragement, and 14 years later the Nobel Prize has recognized both the initial breakthrough and the expanding applications that Galbraith was among the first to envision.
The discovery altered the way bioscience is conducted, Galbraith said, because GFP has proven effective in marking cells that had been all but impossible to study in the live tissues of organisms from bacteria to mice to other plants and animals used as models.
That crucial step—a simple way to label living cells with a fluorescent marker—now lets researchers in medicine, agriculture and basic cell biology examine the function of cells in any living organism. Since 1980, Galbraith says, he had been looking for a technique to label plant cells according to their function, where marking was more difficult than in animal cells.
”We engineered the Green Fluorescent Protein into plants so that it was produced only in specific cells,” Galbraith says. ”We have been working with that technique ever since that time, to make it possible to do cell sorting to isolate these different cells. Using our methods, we now can describe all of the genes that are active within any cell type within virtually any organism. Without the discovery of GFP, none of this would have been possible.”
Along with Chalfie, a biological sciences professor at Columbia University, the other co-winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize were Osamu Shimomura, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University Medical School, and Roger Y. Tsien, 56, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego.
Plant Sciences Professor and BIO5 member David Galbraith, PhD, said today that he felt a personal attachment to the Nobel Prize given on Wednesday to Martin Chalfie and two others. The prize honored Chalfie’s paper in 1994 that showed how to use the jellyfish’s glow—caused by a Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP, gene in its DNA—to mark a worm’s nerve cells.
With days of the publication of that paper, Galbraith, working in Arizona, was struck by an idea. That marker could become a much larger breakthrough for researchers trying to study cells in organs where individual cells were difficult, often impossible, to separate out and analyze.
”I read the jellyfish paper, and right away I thought, we should put that to use in plant cells,” Galbraith said.
Galbraith asked Chalfie to help him put the GFP gene to immediate use. Chalfie sent him samples of the DNA that encodes the green fluorescence, and some encouragement, and 14 years later the Nobel Prize has recognized both the initial breakthrough and the expanding applications that Galbraith was among the first to envision.
The discovery altered the way bioscience is conducted, Galbraith said, because GFP has proven effective in marking cells that had been all but impossible to study in the live tissues of organisms from bacteria to mice to other plants and animals used as models.
That crucial step—a simple way to label living cells with a fluorescent marker—now lets researchers in medicine, agriculture and basic cell biology examine the function of cells in any living organism. Since 1980, Galbraith says, he had been looking for a technique to label plant cells according to their function, where marking was more difficult than in animal cells.
”We engineered the Green Fluorescent Protein into plants so that it was produced only in specific cells,” Galbraith says. ”We have been working with that technique ever since that time, to make it possible to do cell sorting to isolate these different cells. Using our methods, we now can describe all of the genes that are active within any cell type within virtually any organism. Without the discovery of GFP, none of this would have been possible.”
Along with Chalfie, a biological sciences professor at Columbia University, the other co-winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize were Osamu Shimomura, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Boston University Medical School, and Roger Y. Tsien, 56, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Runoff Research Promotes Healthier Aquifers
[Source: USDA, Laura McGinnis] - Where rain falls can influence the quality of surface water before it enters underground reservoirs, some of which provide water that eventually comes out of our taps.
That's one conclusion from a collaborative study by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the University of Arizona (UA). The ARS and UA scientists are investigating how urban landscapes influence storm runoff and water pollutants. The focus of their study is the greater Tucson metropolitan region, which has quadrupled in size since the early 1960s.
Like many Arizona cities, Tucson is looking into "enhanced stormwater recharge" to capitalize on the region's rare, but intense, downpours. Enhanced recharge is the process of improving groundwater reservoirs with strategic engineering, such as artificial wells to store water or porous pavement that allows more water to trickle into aquifers.
Understanding how housing density affects the region's aquifers can be helpful in identifying the best enhanced-recharge methods for a specific area.
Jean McLain, an ARS microbiologist at the U.S. Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center in Maricopa, Ariz., is working with a team of UA scientists, led by Kathleen Lohse of the School of Natural Resources, to examine how housing density affects the levels of nutrients, fecal bacteria, metals and organic pollutants in storm runoff.
They're also researching whether and how those substances enter aquifers. This information is essential for selecting optimal enhanced-recharge methods.
Impervious surface areas, such as paved parking lots, have higher runoff than absorbent surfaces. Preliminary studies show that this allows for less processing of pollutants, leading, in turn, to higher levels of enteric bacteria and nutrients in the water samples.
Ultimately, this collaboration will assist in developing effective best management practices for promoting aquifer water quality. For example, an effective recharge method for the kind of runoff mentioned above might allow the water to slowly filter through the soil, removing pollutants before the water enters underground reservoirs.
ARS is a scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
That's one conclusion from a collaborative study by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the University of Arizona (UA). The ARS and UA scientists are investigating how urban landscapes influence storm runoff and water pollutants. The focus of their study is the greater Tucson metropolitan region, which has quadrupled in size since the early 1960s.
Like many Arizona cities, Tucson is looking into "enhanced stormwater recharge" to capitalize on the region's rare, but intense, downpours. Enhanced recharge is the process of improving groundwater reservoirs with strategic engineering, such as artificial wells to store water or porous pavement that allows more water to trickle into aquifers.
Understanding how housing density affects the region's aquifers can be helpful in identifying the best enhanced-recharge methods for a specific area.
Jean McLain, an ARS microbiologist at the U.S. Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center in Maricopa, Ariz., is working with a team of UA scientists, led by Kathleen Lohse of the School of Natural Resources, to examine how housing density affects the levels of nutrients, fecal bacteria, metals and organic pollutants in storm runoff.
They're also researching whether and how those substances enter aquifers. This information is essential for selecting optimal enhanced-recharge methods.
Impervious surface areas, such as paved parking lots, have higher runoff than absorbent surfaces. Preliminary studies show that this allows for less processing of pollutants, leading, in turn, to higher levels of enteric bacteria and nutrients in the water samples.
Ultimately, this collaboration will assist in developing effective best management practices for promoting aquifer water quality. For example, an effective recharge method for the kind of runoff mentioned above might allow the water to slowly filter through the soil, removing pollutants before the water enters underground reservoirs.
ARS is a scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Understanding Underground Stems Focus of $4 million NSF Grant
[Source: Deborah Daun, BIO5] - Anyone who's tried to remove Bermuda grass from their yard knows about plant rhizomes. These stubborn underground stems give weeds—and other plants—many advantages, not the least of which is that even after you remove the above-ground plant, only a small portion of the underground stem needs to remain for the plant to survive and try to take over your yard once more.
Understanding the genetics and development of rhizomes is the focus of a four-year, $4 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to a UA-led team of scientists. "We want to find the genes responsible for producing rhizomes," says BIO5 member David Gang, PhD, associate professor of Plant Sciences, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "The genetic triggers, the signals, the regulators, and also the genes that actually build the plant."
Gang is principal investigator for the grant; his co-PIs are BIO5 member Carol Soderlund, UA research associate professor of Plant Sciences, and Jay Thelen, assistant professor of Biochemistry at the University of Missouri. The plant biologists plan to study the rhizomes of a wide range of medicinal and weedy plants, from primitive ferns and rushes to complex flowering plants.
The fact that both simple and complex plants have rhizomes is part of what makes them so interesting. The original plant stem, the one used by all early land plants, was the rhizome. Early on in the evolution of plants, rhizomes remained common, but then—perhaps because there were evolutionary advantages to growing upwards instead of along the ground—plants abandoned the underground stems for a time. Yet rhizomes re-emerged in later plants, perhaps because of the benefits rhizomes confer—things like being able to resist fire or search far afield for water—became valuable once more.
Bermuda grass isn't the only rhizome-bearing weed to frustrate farmers and homeowners. "Most of the world's 10 worst weeds use rhizomes," Gang says. "They've adapted them as a mechanism to invade new territory and crowd out other plants." Gang says better understanding rhizomes may one day help us better control weedy grasses, which cause huge economic losses worldwide every year, as well as waterway weeds like giant salvinia, which is contaminating or destroying freshwater sources worldwide. "If we can understand the genetics of what makes a weedy rhizome so invasive, then we might be able to come up with strategies to control them better--strategies that affect just the rhizomes, so that we don't have to rely so heavily on broad-spectrum herbicides."
The practical applications of understanding rhizomes extend well beyond weed control, however. "If we can understand how a rhizome grows and how it is different from an upright stem, then we can better understand how upright stems grow and develop as well," Gang says. That understanding could ultimately help improve the yields of everything from trees that supply paper pulp to biofuel sources and food crops. "So maybe you can use less land to produce more food," Gang says. "In the next 50 years especially, doing so is going to be an important issue around the world. There's a huge potential impact here."
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Small RNA Molecules Provide Big Tools for Understanding Plant Development
[Source: Deborah Daun, BIO5 Insitute, UA] - University of Arizona researchers are among those who have discovered a source of previously scarce small RNA molecules. Their finding, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a valuable new tool for better understanding how plants grow and develop.
All living things contain small RNA molecules, explains Vicki Chandler, PhD, UA Regents' Professor and director of the BIO5 Institute. Some small RNA molecules help the genes in cells to carry out their instructions; others silence genes and prevent them from acting. In plants, two types of small RNA molecules have been studied, one of them 21 nucleotides long, the other 24 nucleotides long. (Nucleotides are the atomic "building blocks" of all genetic material.)
Working with a mutant strain of maize, Chandler and her colleagues have honed in on a distinct class of small RNA molecule, one that's 22 nucleotides long. The 21- and 22-nucleotide RNAs are scarce in most plants—including wild maize—but in the mutant strain, the researchers discovered that they were common because the 24-nucleotide RNAs are dramatically reduced.
Having a reliable source of the 21- and 22-nucleotide RNA means plant biologists can now study these molecules in depth, and work out the pathways they follow to regulate plant genes. "We don't yet know exactly what it [the 22-nucleotide RNA] is doing in the cells, so there'll be a whole new line of experiments as we try to figure it out," Chandler says. She adds that there may well be other understudied small RNA molecules waiting to be looked at as well. "I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with these small regulatory RNAs. There's still a lot to learn, and that's exciting."
The information that results from studying "new" small RNAs will become doubly valuable as other plant biologists (including BIO5 member Rod Wing) finish refining the genetic sequence of maize. "The two together [the small RNA molecules and the sequenced maize genome] will provide a lot of new tools for better understanding plant growth and function," Chandler says.
That work could ultimately have implications for everything from environmental and ecological issues to agriculture and medicine. "Gene regulation is fundamental to so many issues," Chandler says. "This [the 22-nucleotide RNA molecule] is one example of a pathway that—once it's worked out—could be targeted to address them."
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
USDA to Provide $9.4M for Specialty Crop Genomics
[Source: Genome Web News, a GenomeWeb staff reporter ] - NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Nine universities will use funds from the US Department of Agriculture to conduct genomic studies on a variety of specialty crops aimed at improving the quality, yield, and traits of the crops, the USDA said Tuesday.
The $9.4 million, funded through the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, will support research into the genomics of sunflower, black cherry, peach, strawberry, apple, lettuce, potato, and tomato.
Under USDA’s National Research Initiative Plant Genome Program, scientists at the universities will use the money to study specialty crops in a program that augments the Specialty Crop Research Initiative started by the 2008 Farm Bill.
"These grants will create new knowledge, information, genomic resources and seeds that may improve fruit quality, yield, drought tolerance and disease resistance in specialty crops," said USDA Chief Scientist Gale Buchanan.
The aim of the plant program is to generate knowledge about the structure, function, and organization of plant genomes in order to improve crop sustainability, efficiency, and breeding, USDA said. The agency also expects this research to create new “educational, training, and extension avenues for students and the public in the area of fruit and vegetable crop sciences,” Buchanan said.
Under the program, the University of Arizona will receive $319,000; the University of California-Davis will receive a $362,500 grant and a $400,000 grant; the University of Georgia will receive two $400,000 grants; Michigan State University will receive one $5.4 million grant and a $400,000 grant; the University of New Hampshire will receive $383,000; Pennsylvania State University will receive $362,500; Virginia Tech will receive $400,000, and Washington State University will receive grants of $400,000 and $150,000.
MSU’s grant of $5.4 million is a Coordinated Agricultural Project award for studying specialty potatoes and tomatoes.
More information may be found here.
The $9.4 million, funded through the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, will support research into the genomics of sunflower, black cherry, peach, strawberry, apple, lettuce, potato, and tomato.
Under USDA’s National Research Initiative Plant Genome Program, scientists at the universities will use the money to study specialty crops in a program that augments the Specialty Crop Research Initiative started by the 2008 Farm Bill.
"These grants will create new knowledge, information, genomic resources and seeds that may improve fruit quality, yield, drought tolerance and disease resistance in specialty crops," said USDA Chief Scientist Gale Buchanan.
The aim of the plant program is to generate knowledge about the structure, function, and organization of plant genomes in order to improve crop sustainability, efficiency, and breeding, USDA said. The agency also expects this research to create new “educational, training, and extension avenues for students and the public in the area of fruit and vegetable crop sciences,” Buchanan said.
Under the program, the University of Arizona will receive $319,000; the University of California-Davis will receive a $362,500 grant and a $400,000 grant; the University of Georgia will receive two $400,000 grants; Michigan State University will receive one $5.4 million grant and a $400,000 grant; the University of New Hampshire will receive $383,000; Pennsylvania State University will receive $362,500; Virginia Tech will receive $400,000, and Washington State University will receive grants of $400,000 and $150,000.
MSU’s grant of $5.4 million is a Coordinated Agricultural Project award for studying specialty potatoes and tomatoes.
More information may be found here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)