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Karla Haack, who received her Ph.D. in 2009 in molecular biology from the School of Biological Sciences, and is a member of the College of Sciences Advisory Board, is one of five new 2023-2024 member leaders of the American Physiological Society (APS). Haack, a medical writer for Merck, was elected as a councilor during the recent APS Summit in Long Beach, California. Prior to joining Merck in 2021, Haack taught anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology courses at Kennesaw State University (KSU) in Georgia. Haack completed her postdoctoral research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Newswise | 2023-04-23T00:00:00-04:00
Yeast are carb lovers, sustaining themselves by fermenting sugars and starches from sources such as dough, grapes, and grains, with bread, wine, and beer as happy byproducts. Now, researchers have made one type of yeast a little less dependent on carbs by enabling it to use light as energy. The work, reported last week on the preprint server bioRxiv, is “the first step in more complex modes of engineering artificial photosynthesis,” says Magdalena Rose Osburn, a geobiologist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the research. The study's four co-authors are all with the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection: Ph.D. student Autumn Peterson, senior scientist and grant writer Carina Baskett; Will Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences; and research scientist Anthony Burnetti.
Science | 2023-04-18T00:00:00-04:00
Life depends on molecular machines made of proteins that interact with each other to form functional complexes. Researchers need accurate descriptions of protein-protein interactions to understand molecular biosystems, but obtaining such descriptions is very challenging, especially for theoretical approaches. Generalizing AlphaFold 2, a powerful deep learning algorithm for predicting protein structures from sequence, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory proposed a computational approach, AF2Complex, to not only predict the atomic structural models of interacting proteins, but also to predict whether multiple proteins interact, even if they experience transient interactions that are difficult to capture experimentally. The Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences researchers are Mu Gao, senior research scientist, and Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor; Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair & GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology. (Their study is funded in part by the U.S. Dept. of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.)
U.S. Department of Energy | 2023-04-17T00:00:00-04:00
Fermented foods like kimchi have been an integral part of Korean cuisine for thousands of years. Today, most kimchi is made through mass fermentation in glass, steel, or plastic containers, but it’s long been claimed that the highest quality kimchi is fermented in traditional handmade clay jars called onggi. David Hu, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Georgia W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, used fluid dynamics to prove how onggi make kimchi taste so good. The results were published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. (This story was also covered in list23, SFGate, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Gulf News, Yahoo!News, Ars Technica and Technology Networks.)
Cosmos Magazine | 2023-04-17T00:00:00-04:00
Peat, the ingredient that makes bagged soil light and spongy, comes from wetlands. It can increase the amount of water soil holds onto while also, paradoxically, increasing its drainage ability — creating an ideal environment for nurturing plants. But while it does all of those things, extracting it is problematic because it strips the bogs it comes from of their carbon stores, and hinders their ability to keep storing carbon — both important parts of fighting climate change. Caitlin Petro, a research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences who studies peatlands and the plants in them, explains that it can take millennia for just a few feet of peat to form.
Washington Post | 2023-04-05T00:00:00-04:00
Georgia Tech researchers show that rising temperatures in northern regions may damage peatlands, critical ecosystems for storing carbon from the atmosphere — and could decouple vital processes in microbial support systems. Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological Sciences, and Caitlin Petro, research scientist who works with Kostka, recently led a collaborative study to investigate how this critical type of ecosystem (and the "missing link" of microbial processes that support it) may react to the increased temperature and carbon dioxide levels predicted to come with climate change.
Science Daily | 2023-04-03T00:00:00-04:00
Toad tongues are ready for their closeup — extremely close closeups — in this video from San Francisco PBS station KQED. The closeups and slow-motion photography are necessary to show the role toad saliva plays in snatching crickets, worms, and other prey in the blink of an eye. Thanks to research from the team of David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics, science learned that a toad’s saliva starts off thick and sticky. But when the saliva hits prey at a high speed, it thins out dramatically, pouring into every nook and cranny the tongue touches. And then, it becomes sticky again, drawing that meal down the hatch.
KQED | 2023-03-28T00:00:00-04:00
Fish that tend patches of stringy algae seem to shield branching corals from the worst effects of marine heat waves and help them recover after bleaching. In 2019, the reefs near the French Polynesian island of Moorea in the South Pacific Ocean endured their worst heat stress event in 14 years. Branching corals there bleached en masse. Some of those colonies were in "gardens" defended by farmerfish, which cultivate their own algae for food and chase off fish that eat plants and corals. The researchers discovered that, after one year, just 44 per cent of colonies inside gardens died compared with 67 per cent of those outside gardens. What’s more, colonies on the turf of the territorial fish were twice as likely to recover living tissue to the levels they had been before bleaching. Mark Hay, Regents Professor and Teasley Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, didn't work on the research but said that tissue recovery was "a big deal" and that the farmerfish seem to be having a positive effect. (Subscription required)
New Scientist | 2023-03-19T00:00:00-04:00
Plants, like animals and people, seek refuge from climate change. And when they move, they take ecosystems with them. To understand why and how plants have trekked across landscapes throughout time, researchers are calling for a new framework. The key to protecting biodiversity in the future may be understanding the past. Jenny McGuire, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences, spearheaded a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported paper on the topic in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. McGuire and her collaborators highlight the outstanding needs for successful future conservation efforts. The paper brings together conservation research that illuminates the complex and constantly evolving dynamics brought on by climate change and the ever-shifting ways humans use land. These factors, McGuire said, interact over time to create dynamic changes and illustrate the need to incorporate time perspectives into conservation strategies by looking deep into the past. (This research was also covered in Time Magazine.)
National Science Foundation | 2023-03-06T00:00:00-05:00
Billions of years ago, before there were beasts, bacteria or any living organism, there were RNAs. These molecules were probably swirling around with amino acids and other rudimentary biomolecules, merging and diverging, on an otherwise lifeless crucible of a planet. Did one of those biomolecules lead to the development of 'protoribosomes' that would work their magic to kickstart life on early Earth? An Israeli biologist won a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that theory. That scientist and another in Japan say they're closing in on building that protoribosome in their labs. Nature asked scientists to weigh in on that prospect, and one of them is Anton Petrov, research scientist and evolutionary biologist in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Petrov is also a member of Georgia Tech's Center for the Origins of Life (COOL).
How did life begin? One key ingredient is coming into view | 2023-03-01T00:00:00-05:00
