Reed College
Reed College

Biology Department

A Round-up of Recent Good News in the Biology Department

Posted February 29, 2024

There is lots of good news to celebrate in the department this spring! A round-up of some of the exciting developments in our faculty's research programs include:

Applewhite Lab: 

  • Three new papers!
    • Applewhite DA, Bhalla N, Cabezas-Wallscheid N, Erez N, Li M, Polo JM, Taguchi T, Thiam AR, Wang X. Mentoring the next generation of cell biologists. Nat Cell Biol. 2024 Jan;26(1):15-18. doi: 10.1038/s41556-023-01278-7. PMID: 38228826. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38228826/
    • Zhao A, Varady S, O'Kelley-Bangsberg M, Deng V, Platenkamp A, Wijngaard P, Bern M, Gormley W, Kushkowski E, Thompson K, Tibbetts L, Conner AT, Noeckel D, Teran A, Ritz A, Applewhite DA. From network analysis to experimental validation: identification of regulators of non-muscle myosin II contractility using the folded-gastrulation signaling pathway. BMC Mol Cell Biol. 2023 Oct 11;24(1):32. doi: 10.1186/s12860-023-00492-3. PMID: 37821823; PMCID: PMC10568788. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37821823/
    • Zhao AJ, Montes-Laing J, Perry WMG, Shiratori M, Merfeld E, Rogers SL, Applewhite DA. The Drosophila spectraplakin Short stop regulates focal adhesion dynamics by cross-linking microtubules and actin. Mol Biol Cell. 2022 May 1;33(5):ar19. doi: 10.1091/mbc.E21-09-0434. Epub 2022 Mar 2. PMID: 35235367; PMCID: PMC9282009. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35235367/

Cerveny Lab:

  • A New Light-Sheet Microscope and a new statistician picked up the nascent Bio-Stats collaboration.
  • Two new papers all with the majority of work completed by recent students
    • Hagen OL, Kim Y, Kushkowski E, Rouse H, Cerveny KL. Eye Removal in Living Zebrafish Larvae to Examine Innervation-dependent Growth and Development of the Visual System. J Vis Exp. 2022 Feb 11;(180). doi: 10.3791/63509. PMID: 35225280.
      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35225280/
    • Cerveny KL, Bronstein H, Hagen O, Lamb DB, Martin G, Tower I, Van Duzer A, Welch E, Varga M. Mutations linked to loss of cell cycle control can render cells responsive to local differentiation cues. MicroPubl Biol. 2021 Oct 1;2021:10.17912/micropub.biology.000481. doi: 10.17912/micropub.biology.000481. PMID: 34723143; PMCID: PMC8553407. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34723143/

Fey Lab: 

  • New first-author student papers from recent grads!
    • Meredith E Theus, Julia Michaels, Samuel B Fey, Interactive effects of temperature and bisphenol A on phytoplankton growth and community structure, Conservation Physiology, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2023, coad021, https://doi.org/10.1093/conphys/coad021
    • Slein Margaret A., Bernhardt Joey R., O'Connor Mary I. and Fey Samuel B. 2023. Effects of thermal fluctuations on biological processes: a meta-analysis of experiments manipulating thermal variabilityProc. R. Soc. B.2902022222520222225 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.2225
    • Meier, H. S., Schuman, I. J., Layden, T. J., Ritz, A., Kremer, C. T., & Fey, S. B. (2022). Temperature-mediated transgenerational plasticity influences movement behaviour in the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Functional Ecology, 36, 2969–2982. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.14214
    • Schuman, Isaac J., Hannah S. Meier, Tamara J. Layden, and Samuel B. Fey. 2022. “ The Relationship between Thermal Spatial Variability and Mean Temperature Alters Movement and Population Dynamics.” Ecosphere 13(9): e4254. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4254
    • Theus, M.E., Layden, T.J., McWilliams, N., Crafton-Tempel, S., Kremer, C.T. and Fey, S.B. (2022), Photoperiod influences the shape and scaling of freshwater phytoplankton responses to light and temperature. Oikos, 2022: e08839. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.08839
  • They made the cover of Nature!

Mellies Lab:

  • A second NSF RUI (3-year) grant to study the plastic eating bacteria! 
    • Collaborators include Shivani Ahuja in Chem and Irene Newton at the U of Indiana. 
  • A new paper coming in October! 
    • In the journal Bioengineering, presenting a two-step, biological process to degrade, and eventually to recycle PET water bottles.
  • Jay was elected to a Fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. The Academy, the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, recognizes excellence, originality, service and leadership in the microbial sciences. Academy Fellows are eminent leaders in the field of microbiology and are relied upon for authoritative advice and insight on critical issues in microbiology. 

Ritz Lab:

  • Anna was awarded a 2023 MCS Mid-Career Faculty Mentor Award from the Council on Undergraduate Research.
  • New papers in collaboration with recent students!
    • Pramesh Singh, Hannah Kuder, Anna Ritz, Identification of disease modules using higher-order network structure, Bioinformatics Advances, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2023, vbad140, https://doi.org/10.1093/bioadv/vbad140
    • Tunç Başar Köse, Jiarong Li, and Anna Ritz.Growing Directed Acyclic Graphs: Optimization Functions for Pathway Reconstruction Algorithms.Journal of Computational Biology.Jul 2023.814-828.http://doi.org/10.1089/cmb.2022.0376

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cmb.2022.0376

  • Growing DAGs: Optimization Functions for Pathway Reconstruction Algorithms. Tunç Başar Köse, Jiarong Li, Anna Ritz. bioRxiv 2022.07.27.501737; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.27.50173
    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.27.501737v3 (preprint)
  • Post-bacs in the group (Altaf Barelvi and Oliver Anderson) presented a poster at the 2023 Regulatory and Systems Genomics conference at UCLA. 
  • Work by summer research student (Eriksen Liu, CS) has been accepted to the national ACM Student Research Competition (poster presentation in March).

Zornik Lab:

  • Work on his NIH granted in 202 is starting to ramp up!
  • A new research associate, Val Osterberg, joined the lab.

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