Chibuzo Anojulu, a sophomore at Penn State Lehigh Valley, has been selected to participate in the Society for Developmental Biology's (SDB) Choose Development program. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Choose Development pairs undergraduate students from across the United States with leading researchers in developmental biology for a long-term professional development and research training project.
On Twitter, a popular microblogging and social-networking service, statements about vaccines may have unexpected effects -- positive messages may backfire, according to a team of Penn State researchers led by Marcel Salathé, an assistant professor of biology. The team tracked the pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages to which Twitter users were exposed and then observed how those users expressed their own sentiments about a new vaccine for combating influenza H1N1 -- a virus strain responsible for swine flu. The results, which may help health officials improve strategies for vaccination-awareness efforts, are published in the journal EPJ Data Science.
For the first time, the complete genomes of three separate populations of aye-ayes -- a type of lemur -- have been sequenced and analyzed in an effort to help guide conservation efforts. The results of the genome-sequence analyses will be published in an early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online during the week of March 25. The team of scientists is led by George H. Perry, assistant professor of anthropology and biology at Penn State; Webb Miller, professor of biology and of computer science and engineering at Penn State; and Edward Louis, director of Conservation Genetics at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium and director of the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership, NGO.
Elliot M. Meyerowitz, George W. Beadle Professor of Biology and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the California Institute of Technology, will present the Russell Marker Lectures in Genetic Engineering on March 27 and 28 at the Penn State University Park campus. The free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
Whether existing ecological communities can persist intact as temperatures rise may depend as much on biological interactions that shape communities themselves as on the effects of climate change, according to a Penn State biology researcher.
Yingwei Mao, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State, has been honored with a National Scientist Development Grant from the American Heart Association. The grant supports highly promising beginning scientists in their progress toward independence by encouraging and adequately funding research projects that can bridge the gap between completion of research training and readiness for successful competition as an independent investigator.
Yingwei Mao's research focuses on how particular genetic defects play a role in the onset of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression, autism and bipolar disorder. Recently, Mao and his colleagues pinpointed the specific neurological effects of deficits within a gene that is disrupted in schizophrenia -- the DISC1 gene.
Photo of the Day set for December 2012. Penn State's University Park campus.
Penn State University Waller Professor of Plant Biology and past President of the American Society of Plant Biologists Sarah M. Assmann is the invited author of the inaugural Coulter Review article to be published in the January issue of the International Journal of Plant Sciences. A world leader in the field of plant-cell signal transduction, Assmann studies plant genetics and how plants receive and respond to stimuli from the environment.
In the review paper, Assmann describes how an increasing human population presents new challenges to 21st-century agriculture, especially since such stresses as climate change and limited arable land can disrupt the ability of many food crops to flourish and to provide sufficient calories and nutrients. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Earth's population will reach 9 billion people by 2050. To meet the nutritional needs of this population, Assmann said, plant biologists must study how and why some plants are heartier and more capable than others of tolerating these stresses.
By examining art printed from woodblocks spanning five centuries, Blair Hedges, a professor of biology at Penn State University, has identified the species responsible for making the ever-present wormholes in European printed art since the Renaissance. The hole-makers, two species of wood-boring beetles, are widely distributed today, but the "wormhole record," as Hedges calls it, reveals a different pattern in the past, where the two species met along a zone across central Europe like a battle line of two armies. The research, which is the first of its kind to use printed art as a "trace fossil" to precisely date species and to identify their locations, will be published in the journal Biology Letters on 21 November 2012.
The Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology planned for today and Tuesday have been canceled. Jonathan Losos, the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America and a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, was to give the free public lectures, sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.
A new method for studying the role of a critical neurotransmitter in disorders such as epilepsy, anxiety, insomnia, depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol addiction could help create safer and more efficient drugs for treating those conditions. A group of scientists led by Gong Chen, associate professor of biology at Penn State, has created the new method by molecularly engineering a model synapse--a structure through which a nerve cell sends signals to another cell.
A team of Penn State scientists has uncovered the mechanism by which RNA viruses—which include those that cause the common cold, SARS, influenza, and polio—copy themselves. According to David Boehr, assistant professor of chemistry and a co-leader of the team, the discovery sheds light on a poorly understood region of an enzyme associated with the process of replicating genetic material, and could be an important step toward improving vaccine design.
Penn State's Charles Fisher, professor of biology, will be a featured guest on the BBC World Service Radio weekly discussion program, The Forum, at 7:05 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, Sept. 22. Fisher joins Australian author M.L. Stedman and German conductor Alexander Liebreich for a wide-ranging discussion on Isolation. Fisher focuses on isolation of ecosystems around hydrothermal vents in the deep sea, personal experiences with lengthy research cruises, and expeditions on the sea floor. The program, titled "Isolation," also will be archived online beginning on Sunday, Sept. 23, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004kln9. A preview of the show is online now at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00y2wtv. The Forum is heard weekly by 180 million listeners worldwide.
Coral migration, like that of other species, is halted by the Eastern Pacific Barrier. A coral species found in abundance from Indonesia eastward to Fiji, Samoa, and the Line Islands rarely crosses the Eastern Pacific Barrier toward the coast of the Americas, according to a team of researchers led by Iliana Baums, assistant professor of biology at Penn State. Charles Darwin hypothesized in 1880 that most species could not disperse across the marine barrier, and Baums's study is the first comprehensive test of that hypothesis using coral. Her findings have important environmental and economic implications.
Mange and viral diseases have a substantial, recurring impact on the health and size of reintroduced wolf packs living in Yellowstone National Park, according to ecologists. Following the restoration of gray wolves to Yellowstone in 1996, researchers collected blood from the animals to monitor parasite-induced disease and death. They also tracked the wolves in each pack to follow their survival and allow additional data-gathering. "We can look at the biology of the diseases and predict which ones will come in first," said Peter J. Hudson, Willaman Professor of Biology and director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State. "What was surprising was that so many diseases came in so fast, but those were the ones we expected to come in first. It wasn't really a sequence, they were almost there immediately. That's very interesting in itself."
