Biology DepartmentUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst

A recent article by Patricia Brennan (UMass Biology Dept.) and Richard Prum (Yale University) has received considerable press attention. The Journal of Zoology paper, entitled on the "Erection mechanism of the ratite penis," reports that ratites (large flightless birds including the ostrich and emu) have a lymphatic erection mechanism. The finding solves the long standing mystery of how the penis of large ratites functions and suggests that lymphatic erection evolved in the last common ancestor of birds.

Press coverage of the paper includes news articles from the BBC and Nature.

Biology professor Duncan Irschick's research on rapid evolution in island lizards is described in a chapter opener in "The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution," a book by acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer. Click here to read an excerpt from the chapter.

The Life Sciences Graduate Research Symposium, a student-initiated event held on November 18, included a full day of talks and an evening poster session. The symposium featured the research of grad students from eight life science programs at UMass Amherst (Molecular & Cellular Biology, Neuroscience & Behavior, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Environmental Conservation, Microbiology, Animal Biotechnology, and Plant Soil & Insect Sciences). More than 150 people participated.

The ninth annual Symposium in Plant Biology was held on October 8th and 9th in the Integrated Science Building at UMass Amherst . The symposium, entitled “Auxin and Expansion”, examined the essential hormone auxin and its relationship to fundamental processes of growth. The symposium was sponsored by the UMass Plant Biology Graduate Program and co-sponsored by the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology at the University of Nottingham, UK. The meeting was international, with six of the thirteen invited speakers traveling from Europe and fifteen of the 153 attendees from Europe or Asia. The meeting drew domestic participants from colleges and universities throughout the Northeast, including Worcester Polytechnic, University of Vermont, Penn State, Dartmouth, and Harvard. Participants presented more than 50 posters. Attendees included many students, both graduate and undergraduate. The talks and posters were excellent, and discussions were long-lived and enthusiastic.

Research in Biology professor Eric Bittman's lab has identified a mutation that affects the internal circadian clocks that control the timing of mammalian physiology and behavior. The mutation causes an animal's "master clock" (a pacemaker in the brain that sets the clocks that run in cells throughout the body) to run abnormally fast, and also profoundly increases the ability of light to reset biological rhythms. Identification of the gene responsible for the mutation will clarify the mechanisms by which physiological functions are coordinated in time and thereby help explain why we suffer from jet lag and have trouble adjusting to shift work. The lab's findings are described in two recent publications in the Journal of Biological Rhythms.