Biology Undergrad and Post-doc Publish in Current Biology

Biology Department researchers led by Wei-Lih Lee have identified a new molecular player in asymmetric cell division, a regulatory protein named She1 whose role in chromosome- and spindle positioning wasn’t known before. Asymmetric cell division is important in the self-renewal of stem cells and because it ensures that daughter cells have different fates and functions.

Lee and postdoctoral researcher Steven Markus, with undergraduate Junior Fellow Katelyn Kalutkiewicz, identified She 1 as the first known regulator of asymmetric cell division that inhibits the dynein engine, but surprisingly also promotes asymmetric division. Their work will appear in the December 4 print edition of Current Biology and is supported by the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Read more here.

Herbarium Collection Receives Grant

The Herbarium (MASS) recently received a four-year NSF “Advancing Digitization in Biological Collections Thematic Collections Network” grant as part of a consortium of five other New England herbaria including those at Harvard and Yale. This was one of four ADBC grants awarded in 2012. Under this grant, the University of Massachusetts herbarium will be responsible for data-basing approximately 90,000 UMass specimens of New England vascular plants as well as approximately 12,000 from Westfield State University and 3000 from the Harvard Forest Herbarium in Petersham. Once digitized, a subset will be analyzed for the impact of climate change and land use on vegetation patterns in New England. The digitizing equipment will remain at the University of Massachusetts to become a focal point for digitizing other herbaria in the region.

Junior Fellow Awards Announced

The year-long Junior Fellows Program supports the research of outstanding seniors majoring in the life sciences. Each Fellow receives a cash award and participates in a seminar course that involves discussion of their research projects, as well as topics in modern cell and molecular biology, neuroscience, biomedicine, and research ethics. At the close of each semester, the Fellows present a public poster or seminar session.

Congratulations to this year's Junior Fellows:

Michael Boucher in Michele Klingbeil's lab in the Microbiology Department

Dan DiCorpo in Peter Chien's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department

Rahul Gantyala in Craig Martin's lab in the Chemistry Department

Katelyn Kalutkiewicz in Wei-Lih Lee's lab in the Biology Department

Di Lin in Jeanne Hardy's lab in the Chemistry Department

Kevin Magalhaes in Dong Wang's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department

Philip McGilvray in Tom Maresca's lab in the Biology Department

Jesse Moskowitz in Rolf Karlstrom's lab in the Biology Department

Bradley Quade in Lila Gierasch's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department

Ankur Sheel in Larry Schwartz's lab in the Biology Department

Laura Stapler in Gerry Downes' lab in the Biology Department

Sarah Tarullo in Scott Garman's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department

Michael Veling in Sam Hazen's lab in the Biology Department

Benjamin Waldman in Steve Sandler's lab in the Microbiology Department

Katherine Walsh in Magdalena Bezanilla's lab in the Biology Department

Emily Zhang in Dom Alfandari's lab in the Veterinary & Animal Sciences Department

Past Junior Fellows:

2011-2012 Junior Fellows

2010-2011 Junior Fellows

2009-2010 Junior Fellows

2008-2009 Junior Fellows

2007-2008 Junior Fellows

Cori Bargmann to Present Sinauer Lecture

Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University will present a talk titled "Using fixed circuits to build flexible behaviors" on November 28 at 4:00 in Engineering Lab room 119. Dr. Bargmann's talk is the 7th annual Sinauer Lecture. Light refreshments will follow the talk.

Blanchard Receives Community Sequencing Program Grant

The Joint Genome Institute of the U.S. Department of Energy recently granted Harvard Forest co-PIs Jeffrey Blanchard (UMass Biology Department), Kristen DeAngelis (UMass), Linda van Diepen (U. of New Hampshire), Serita Frey (U. of New Hampshire), and Jerry Melillo (MBL) a Community Sequencing Program grant. DOE will pay the costs of DNA/RNA library preparation, sequencing, and basic computational processing for 3 terabases of metagenomic (community DNA) and metatranscriptomic (community RNA) data gathered from Harvard Forest soils. Sequencing three terabases (3,000,000,000,000 DNA bases) is roughly equivalent to sequencing 1,000 human and plant genomes, 10,000 ant genomes or 500,000 bacterial genomes. The sequencing and data processing will take 2-3 years.

The project, overseen by researchers with expertise in ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry, microbial ecology and genomics, aims to characterize the microbial communities from several long-term soil warming experiments at the Forest. The three warming projects, ongoing for 6, 9, and 20 years respectively, correspond to three distinct phases of projected carbon dioxide emissions. The DNA/RNA chronosequence resulting from this award will help researchers understand how climate change affects soil microbial community composition and activity over time.

Microorganisms are difficult to classify using visible morphology. But DNA analysis enables researchers to determine which microbes are present in the soil, while RNA sequencing provides a view of which microbes are actively contributing to ecological processes. A 2012 summer REU group project at the Forest helped to prototype the DNA sequencing analysis for this project.

Press releases:

Harvard Forest.

Department of Energy