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News, Events & Jobs

Holiday Food Drive! December 9 through 16

Biology's traditional holiday food drive begins on Monday the 9th and continues through the Holiday Social on Dec. 16th. Please contribute non-perishable food for those in need. more

Volkan Lab Breaks into Print!

The Dec. 18 issue of Current Biology will publish first-author Tristan Li's paper, "Combinatorial rules of precursor specification underlying olfactory neuron diversity." more

Shaw's Peatmoss Sequencing Project Approved

The Joint Genome Institute has approved a proposal by Jon Shaw and co-PI David Weston (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) to sequence the genome of a species of Sphagnum (peatmoss). more

In Plain English VIIa: Zhen-Ming Pei

Zhen-Ming Pei wants to understand how plants sense basic aspects of their environment: salt, temperature and most of all, water.  They do this with ion channels, specialized parts of cell membranes that open and close in response to environmental signals.  If water is present the corresponding channel stays closed.  When the plant lacks water, the channel opens and allows calcium to enter the cell.  There the calcium atoms bind to an array of different proteins, triggering processes which allow plants to save water. 

Identifying the genes responsible requires years of painstaking labor, generating plants with random  mutations and sorting through them to find the ones that don't have the calcium cascade.  That means that the ion channel is not working and its controlling gene has mutated.   Zhen-Ming’s lab can propagate these plants for further study.

Obviously drought- and salt-resistant crops would have great importance for agriculture.  But Zhen-Ming really wants to work on a big question: sensing processes.  The rest of the time he is happy tinkering with his car.

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