Department of Biology
A first draft of the “tree of life” for the roughly 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes -- from platypuses to puffballs -- has been released.A collaborative effort among eleven institutions, the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.Tens of thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life -- some containing… read more about ‘Tree of Life’ for 2.3 Million Species Released »
Biology professor Francois Lutzoni and Co-PI Jolanta Miadlikowska have been awarded $735,285 as part of a $2.5 million collaborative GoLife grant from the National Science Foundation to fill in a large gap in the genealogy of fungi. The five-year award will also encompass engagement of high school students, training of junior scientists in five states, and development of tools with potential applications for studying the evolution of species interactions across the life sciences.(See NSF announcement to learn more) read more about Lutzoni Receives NSF Grant for Fungal Genealogy »
The Lutzoni lab and their collaborators have been awarded a $2.5 million GoLife grant from the National Science Foundation to fill the largest gap in the fungal tree of life. The five-year project will also develop new tools to integrate diverse data layers with the emergent tree as a means to understand the evolution, ecology, and physiology of fungal-plant symbioses. Please see NSF announcement to learn more. read more about Lutzoni Lab Wins $2.5 Million Grant from NSF »
Ester Gaya, formerly a postdoc in the Lutzoni Lab and now a Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has published some of the research she did at Duke. "The adaptive radiation of lichen-forming Teloschistaceae is associated with sunscreening pigments and a bark-to-rock substrate shift" appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI:10.1073/pnas.1507072112. The sunscreen produced by the Teloschistaceae enabled them to diversify from shady to warm and sunny climates, leading to an… read more about Lichens Make Sunscreen! says Former Lutzoni Postdoc »
Grad Student Cari Ficken (Wright Lab) received the New Phytologist Best Student Presentation Award at the Ecological Society of America's centennial meeting, which took place August 9-14. Cari gave a talk on "Differential plant responses to pulsed nitrogen." Looking good out there! read more about Cari Ficken Wins Best Student Presentation Award at ESA »
Laurie Stevison, alumna of the Noor Lab, was awarded the John Maynard Smith Prize 2014 at the recent meeting of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her Prize Lecture was on "The Time-Scale of Recombination Rate Evolution in Great Apes." The prize recognizes outstanding young researchers in the field of evolutionary biology. It honors John Maynard Smith (1920-2004), an eminent British evolutionary biologist and author. Laurie is now doing a postdoc in the laboratory of Jeff Wall at the… read more about Laurie Stevison Wins John Maynard Smith Prize 2014 »
Graduate student Ko-Hsuan Chen (Lutzoni Lab) has received a Graduate Fellowship from the Mycological Society of America. Only two of these fellowships are awarded per year. The award is based on scholastic merit, research ability, and promise as a mycologist. Congratulations, Ko-Hsuan! Previous Duke mycology winners include Kathryn Picard, Brendan Hodkinson, Tami McDonald, Cécile Gueidan, Valerie Reeb, Tim James, and . . . François Lutzoni! read more about Ko-Hsuan Chen Receives MSA Graduate Fellowship »
John Willis loves figuring things out--specifically, how the wildflower Mimulus adapts to different environments. Colonies adapt to different elevations, or degrees of drought, or soil types. Some have even evolved to live on highly contaminated soil near a copper mine. Which of their genes change, and do they change in many little ways or one big way? Why do some separated groups lose the ability to reproduce with their neighbors? Are the genes that help them adapt the same ones that prevent living hybrid offspring?… read more about In Plain English: John Willis »
Fruit flies live long enough to have degenerative diseases? Yes, and Nina Sherwood studies one that impairs the ability to walk. A defective gene affects how the cells of the nervous system talk to muscle cells: the neurons, or transmitter cells, don’t form their synapses correctly and signals don’t go through. But that’s not the whole story. It now appears that the glial cells, once thought to be merely connective tissue, over-react to the malformed synapse and do more damage trying to repair it.… read more about In Plain English: Nina Tang Sherwood »
Meng Chen got his job by accident; that is, he accidentally discovered a mutant while he was a post-doc, and now his lab is defining a new area in the study of light signal transduction. The pre-Socratic philosophers first observed how plants turn and grow towards light; now we know that light is the master switch that turns on or off a full third of the plant genome. Proteins sense the color, intensity, direction and duration of light and send signals down the pathway. Eventually the signals turn on genes… read more about In Plain English: Meng Chen »
Down behind the French building, far from the mailroom and offices, the labs on upper floors and the subterranean teaching space, there is a great kingdom: the kingdom of plants. That is, the greenhouses. This is Michael Barnes’ realm, where he and his horticulturists tend thousands of plants. In some rooms the same plant marches row upon row, grown for research into natural genetic variation or how plants resist disease. But the Live Plant Collections hold 1,000 different species from all over the… read more about In Plain English: Michael Barnes »
Terry Corliss started collecting insects at age 5 and progressed to fish, reptiles and eventually microbes. Now she leads a hard-working team in the teaching labs, seen only when they venture above ground to remove boxes (sometimes disconcertingly marked “Live Animals”) from the mailroom. The Lab Prep Team supports 6 courses and about 1400 students each academic year. Every semester the labs have to roll out like clockwork, and the Prep Team had better have the materials ready when the students show up.… read more about In Plain English: Terry Corliss »
Animals come in all sizes, but how does an animal know when it’s grown to the right size? That’s been puzzling Fred Nijhout for a long time, but he thinks he has part of the answer—at least for tobacco hornworms. It’s because of oxygen deprivation. Instead of lungs, insects have branching tubes which carry air from holes in their bodies down to the cellular level. Their lining is the same stuff as the exoskeleton, folded into cylinders and diving inside the animal. And like the exoskeleton, it does… read more about In Plain English: Fred Nijhout »
The great scientist Sir Isaac Newton formulated his theory of light, indispensable to using microscopes and telescopes, at Cambridge University (England). It seems only fitting that Sam Johnson, who chose his university simply because Newton went there, should now manage Duke’s Light Microscopy Facility, making 20+ high-tech microscopes available to researchers across the university. The scopes take pictures of sea scallop eyes, human cardiac tissue, nanoprobe chips, proteins moving inside living cells, lipid… read more about In Plain English: Sam Johnson »
Alec Motten is excited about bioluminescence—live creatures that glow in the dark. The lab for Organismal Diversity gives him an excuse to gather together as many of them as possible: fireflies, sea pansies, fungi, parchment tube worms, bacteria, single-cell plankton, comb jellyfish, an embarras de richesse. There are representatives of every kingdom except plants. He also throws in some merely fluorescent things which require UV light to glow, like chlorophyll. Mysteries abound when it… read more about In Plain English: Alec Motten »
Before going to college John Mercer joined the Navy. See the world! Experience life! After much training John became a reactor operator (electronic technician reactor, 1st class) on a nuclear submarine. He saw a lot of gray paint. Then he went to college and graduate school to study first biophysics, then chemical physics, but eventually he became a biologist and embarked on a different kind of fantastic voyage. On this voyage John has descended to the level of DNA molecules and proteins… read more about In Plain English: John Mercer »
Deep in the darkest recesses of a cell something determines its fate: How will it react to food or famine? Should it grow and divide? Into two identical daughter cells, or four daughters with mixed-up chromosomes? Paul Magwene wants not only to know how a yeast cell decides to behave, but to watch it do so in real time. He studies a signalling pathway, a series of chemical reactions which transmits signals from the exterior of the cell to the nucleus. There it turns particular genes… read more about In Plain English: Paul Magwene »
When political candidates give a speech or debate an opponent, it’s not just what they say that matters -- it’s also how they say it.A new study by researchers at the University of Miami and Duke University shows that voters naturally seem to prefer candidates with deeper voices, which they associate with strength and competence more than age.https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/218253339&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts… read more about ‘Caveman Instincts’ May Favor Baritone Politicians »
Like many people today, Katia Koelle is fascinated by ancestry. But she's not tracing her family tree; instead, she uses sophisticated mathematics to construct genealogies for viruses like measles and flu. “It just floors me how math can reveal fundamental patterns in biology,” she says. By analyzing viruses’ genetic heritage she can track how they have evolved, how different strains are related, and how their population has risen and fallen over time. Then she can begin to untangle how the virus's environment has… read more about In Plain English: Katia Koelle »
Vikas Bhandawat chose to study the sense of smell in fruit flies because it is so much simpler than sight. Less than 10,000 neurons! But how to control the odors and map the fly's reaction? His group has devised an apparatus that traps the fly between 2 glass plates and confines the odor to one area. Vikas can then track the fly's reaction, not just whether it is attracted or repelled, but how fast it moves, how often it pauses, and its trail over the plate. Looking at his results for 2 different flies, it was striking… read more about In Plain English: Vikas Bhandawat »
Starvation early in life can alter an organism for generations to come, according to a new study in roundworms.The effects are what Duke University biologist Ryan Baugh terms a “bet-hedging strategy.” In nature, the worms live a boom-or-bust lifestyle in which the occasional famine will devastate the population, but not all of the worms are killed. The survivors are smaller and less fertile, and they acquire a toughness that lasts at least two generations.What changes isn’t their genes themselves, but the way in which those… read more about Starvation Effects Handed Down for Generations »
The light-sensing molecules that tell plants whether to germinate, when to flower and which direction to grow were inherited millions of years ago from ancient algae, finds a new study from Duke University.The findings are some of the strongest evidence yet refuting the prevailing idea that the ancestors of early plants got the red light sensors that helped them move from water to land by engulfing light-sensing bacteria, the researchers say.The results appear online in Nature Communications.“Much like we see the world… read more about Plant Light Sensors Came From Ancient Algae »
Greenhouse Supervisor Michael Barnes has been granted certification as a Crop Advisor from the North Carolina CCA Board. The certification requires passing a local and an international exam, specified years of experience, and commitment to a code of ethics. To maintain certification, Michael will have earn 40 hours of continuing education credit every two years. We're sure you're up to it, Michael! read more about Michael Barnes Now a Certified Crop Advisor »
Sherryl Broverman has been honored with the William E. Bennett Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Citizen Science. The Award is given by the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement. The Award recognizes her "remarkable achievements in both increasing attention to HIV in the Duke curriculum and advancing the education of girls in Kenya." Sherryl's work, the nominators wrote, has "both inspired our community and served as a model of rigorous science education through global engagement and service."… read more about Sherryl Broverman Receives William E. Bennett Award »
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 many downstream effects. Identifying the gene… read more about In Plain English: Zhen-Ming Pei »
Chantal Reid is excited about teaching “How Plants Feed and Fuel the World.” She and Jim Siedow have taught it before, but this time is different: they've “flipped” the classroom and instituted “team-based learning.” “You can see the students learning, it’s really exciting,” she says. “I don’t ever want to teach another way.” Flipping? Teams? Huh? In a flipped class, there is no formal lecture; the students prepare by studying the assigned material beforehand. Class begins with a test taken individually and then… read more about In Plain English: Chantal Reid »