With a $684,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Jennifer Ross, assistant professor of Physics, and Biology professor Patricia Wadsworth are building a new microscope that achieves super resolution, allowing scientists to see molecules 100 times smaller than are visible using traditional light microscopy.
Current News
J. Zane Barlow Coleman has been invited to speak at University of Michigan Ann Arbor this spring about her science education research for their Preparing Future Faculty Seminar.
Congratulations to Peter Hepler, emeritus faculty member, who was recently elected a Fellow in AAAS for his contributions as "one of the most influential plant cell biologists, who has continuously and continues to achieve breakthroughs that have guided research directions of numerous plant scientists." Hepler, a cell biologist and physiologist, explores cell growth and division using a variety of microscopic methods. By introducing reporter molecules into living cells, he examines the position and organization of underlying structures such as the cytoskeleton and membranous organelles, and the location and activity of fluxes and gradients of ions such as calcium and protons. The correlations of these data provide insight into the underlying control of cell growth and division.
The Biology Department has a tenure track Assistant Professor Position available in Cellular Biophysics. This position is part of a cluster hire with the Physics Department which has a corresponding position available in Biological Physics at the Assistant Professor level. Review of applications will begin February 15.
Kudos to the following students who received Junior Fellowships this year: Sean Bickerton in Sankaran Thayumanavan's lab in the Chemistry Department; Danielle Cotter in Cynthia Baldwin's lab in the Veterinary and Animal Sciences Department; Lindsay Dawson in Jeanne Hardy's lab in the Chemistry Department; Shannon Egna in Lisa Scott's lab in the Psychology Department; Kari Fischer in Alice Cheung's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department; Peter Garas in Jeff Blaustein's lab in the Psychology Department; Joshua Grolman in Gregory Tew's lab in the Polymer Science and Engineering Department; David Paquette in Lila Gierasch's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department; Kelli Pattavina in Magdalena Bezanilla's lab in the Biology Department; Alexandra Protopopova in Melinda Novak's lab in the Psychology Department; Michael Quercio in Kathleen Arcaro's lab in the Veterinary and Animal Sciences Department; Christine Rega in Jeff Podos' lab in the Biology Department; Jennifer Rivero in Priscilla Clarkson's lab in the Kinesiology Department; Nematullah Sharaf in Alejandro Heuck's lab in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department; Dima Tokar in James Holden's lab in the Microbiology Department.
Elsbeth Walker has been awarded a one-year grant for $125,017 from the USDA to study iron uptake in plants.
Adequate iron uptake by crop plants is necessary for optimizing crop yields and for ensuring that edible crops contain adequate amounts of iron for the diets of both humans and livestock. Iron nutritional status of crop plants is determined both by the efficiency with which they can take up iron from the soil, and the efficiency with which they use iron within their organs and tissues. The Gramineae (grasses), which are among the world's most important crop plants (*e.g.*, rice, maize, and wheat), take up iron by a mechanism that is fundamentally different from that of other plant species. Evidence is accumulating that grasses also accomplish internal iron translocation using mechanisms that are distinct from those used by non-grasses.
The purpose of this study is to identify and characterize the unique molecular mechanisms that grasses use for internal iron movement. Given the importance of grass crops, which include the world's major grain crops, maize, wheat, rice and barley, elucidation of the unique processes that grasses use in overcoming iron deficiency stress is essential. We are testing the hypothesis that the Yellow Stripe-Like (YSL) genes in maize can mediate the transport of iron-PS complexes internally. We choose to examine this family because the founding member of the YSL family, maize YS1, transports Fe(III)-PS complexes and is responsible for the primary assimilation of iron in maize. The possibility that YSLs expressed in the internal tissues of grasses can mediate Fe(III)-PS transport has not been carefully examined.
Chris Woodcock has been selected to assist with the construction of a Cell Image Library that will catalog and annotate images of cells and subcellular organelles with the aim of creating a database that can be searched in the same manner as the current DNA and Protein databases. The work is funded by a two-year $2.4M NIH grant to the American Society for Cell Biology written by a consortium of PIs and co-PIs. By the end of the two-year grant, we hope to establish the feasibility of the approach and demonstrate its value to researchers and teachers. For more details, contact chris@bio.umass.edu.
The HHMI Undergraduate Science Program congratulates the following students for being selected to participate in the 2009-2010 Academic Year Research Internship Program. This year's recipients will receive a $1200 stipend and $500 for lab supplies to conduct independent research in the lab of their choice. This year's recipients represent a variety of majors conducting research in a wide range of labs on campus.
Sarah Fadden (Dr. Sandy Petersen's Lab, Veterinary and Animal Sciences Department); Rebecca Lamothe (Dr. Samuel Hazen's Lab, Biology Department); Kevin Pelland (Dr. Adam Porter's Lab, Department of Plant, Soil and Insect Sciences); Muriel Herd (Dr. Dan Chase's Lab, Biochemistry Department); Jason Lee (Dr. Neil Forbes' Lab, Department of Chemical Engineering; Lynn Liu (Dr. Jennifer Ross' Lab, Department of Physics); Dominick Matos (Dr. John Nambu's Lab, Biology Department); Parth Patel (Dr. Dan Chase's Lab, Biochemistry Department); Avital Percher (Dr. Gregory Tew's Lab, Department of Polymer Science); David Ramsden (Dr. R. Thomas Zoeller's Lab, Biology Department); Jamie Richmond (Dr. Jerrold Meyer's Lab, Department of Psychology); Sruthi Satishchandran (Dr. Gerald Downes' Lab, Biology Department); Michael Theriault (Dr. Elizabeth Stuart's Lab, Microbiology Department); Hannah Tosi (Dr. Duncan Irschick's Lab, Biology Department); Michael Urbanowski (Dr. Tobias Baskin's Lab, Biology Department); Sameen Wijensundara (Dr. Derek Lovley's Lab, Microbiology Department).
