Category Archives: Biology

Biology

Integrating system biology and intratumor gene therapy by trans-complementing the appropriate co-stimulatory … – Nature.com

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Integrating system biology and intratumor gene therapy by trans-complementing the appropriate co-stimulatory ... - Nature.com

Biology

Meet the 29-year-old biology teacher who will compete at Pinehurst – Yahoo Sports

Thirteen years ago, Ben Crenshaw and his design partner, Bill Coore, completed a $2.5 million restoration of Donald Ross Pinehurst No. 2. The project, among many aims, eliminated over 35 acres of irrigated turf, and 650 irrigation heads, while reintroducing natural areas of sand, wiregrass and pine straw.

It was a massive push toward sustainability that Colin Prater can appreciate.

Prater, a 29-year-old mid-amateur whose day job involves teaching biology to over 120 ninth graders at Cheyenne Mountain High in Colorado Springs, Colorado, will often integrate his two passions, science and golf. Discussing ecosystems? Golf courses such as Pinehurst are great examples, Prater says, of the positive impact humans can have on the planet.

The kids love it, Prater jokes, because Ill just keep talking and we wont get anything done, and theyre like, Oh, Prater talked for 45 minutes today about a lake on a golf course.

Just wait until next school year, kids.

Prater will soon have quite the story to tell, about how the former D-II standout and now educator and high-school golf coach qualified for his first major championship and then competed alongside the best players in the world at next weeks 124th U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2.

He just doesnt know exactly how that story is going to play out yet.

I feel like its going to be crazier and more awesome than even Im dreaming about, Prater said via phone Wednesday evening, two days after he earned one of two spots out of the final qualifier at Pronghorn Resorts Nicklaus Course in Bend, Oregon; he got up and down on each of the final two holes to edge Trevor Simsby by a shot. I think I kind of know what to expect, but I still dont know how Im going to react. Like what if some kid wants my autograph? Thats not a question Ive ever been asked. Do I carry my own Sharpie? Or what if I walk out on the range and just see Tiger Woods? I dont know if Im going to lose it or what.

As a youngster growing up in Colorado Springs, Prater would wear red on Sundays just like Woods. Hed do everything else like either his grandfather, legendary high-school football coach Carl Fetters, or Dow Finsterwald, the late PGA champ who tied for third at the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills. Fetters, who has coached in the Colorado Springs area for over six decades now, was a member at The Broadmoor when Prater was first learning the game, and on some days, between baseball practices, hed sit Prater on the range a few spots from Finsterwald and tell his grandson, Just watch him.

As Fetters explained in a video honoring Prater as the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Person of the Year in 2021, the suggestion was because of how smooth he hit the ball, and every swing was the same.

Prater remembers Finsterwald always stressing about grip pressure, how a tight grip led to tight arms, tight shoulders and, worst of all, a tight head.

Hed tell me something, Prater said, and for the next two weeks thats the only thing wed focus on, whatever the heck Dow said.

Prater was a three-sport athlete at Palmer High, the oldest high school in Colorado Springs, playing golf, baseball and basketball for the Terrors, who donned school colors of brown and white. He gave up the latter two sports, however, after dislocating his right collarbone and injuring his right elbow during his junior year.

Never a primary focus, golf suddenly became a ticket to college for the undersized Prater, who started at D-II Colorado Mesa in Grand Junction and captured the Phil Mickelson Award as D-IIs national freshman of the year. He then transferred to Colorado State-Colorado Springs, which offered him the full ride that the University of Colorado didnt, and he ended up capping his collegiate career as a four-time All-American and with 14 individual victories.

I got lucky a couple times, Prater contends, modestly.

Added Praters longtime swing coach, Todd Laxson: Colin has a confidence about him that youre not ever going to hear. He is never afraid of the result of a golf shot that he hits.

When he graduated in May 2019, Prater made plans to move to Phoenix and begin his professional golf career. Hed found a place to live, acquired some financial backing and locked in a job to pay for the rest. But first hed need to complete his student-teaching requirement that fall at Doherty High in Colorado Springs.

Before he finished the semester, he realized he no longer wanted to chase golf professionally.

I really fell in love with teaching, said Prater, whose now-wife but girlfriend at the time, Madi, whom also transferred to UCCS after a year, also didnt want to leave family in Colorado Springs. So, Prater stayed put, accepting a full-time position at Doherty.

For the last few years, Prater has taught and served as the assistant boys and girls golf coach at Cheyenne Mountain High, where most of his family went and where his granddad coached for most of his career; Fetters was the schools first Hall of Fame inductee. Prater married Madi in October 2021, and the couple, which has a 20-month-old daughter, Blake, is expecting a second child in about six weeks.

I 100% would make the same decision again, Prater said. I really love teaching. I really love coaching. I really love having a family now. Being a husband and a dad is the coolest thing on planet earth. Golf is just a hobby.

Albeit a hobby that hes excelled at. Prater is one of just two players to have won Colorados state amateur (twice), mid-amateur (twice, each of the past two years) and match play. During a six-week stretch in Summer 2020, he captured the amateur, match play and took home low-amateur honors at the Colorado Open. Hes competed in three U.S. Amateurs, including at Pinehurst No. 2 in 2019 and last year at Cherry Hills, where he advanced to match play as dozens of family members and students came to watch.

Still the best golf swing Ive ever made in my life, Prater says of the 4-iron he hit for his third shot on the par-4 finishing hole to save bogey and force extra holes against Arizona States Ryggs Johnston, whod go on to win in overtime.

And a couple weeks ago, Prater and partner, Air Force assistant Jimmy Makloski, qualified for the Round of 32 at the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball at Philadelphia Cricket Club.

Not bad for a guy who is lucky if he can sneak away for a couple hours of uninterrupted practice once per week at Cherokee Ridge, a public facility on the west side of town that features nine regular holes and nine par-3 holes.

I probably practiced more in the two days leading up to the Four-Ball than I did the first five months of the year, Prater said.

That said, he intentionally didnt plan on touching a club on Thursday, a day after he got home from Bend at 1 a.m. local time and later fielded about a half-dozen interview requests while also squaring away his travel and lodging for his major debut. Exhausted, Prater instead planned to spend a day with his daughter, going to the park and getting ice cream, before he leaves town again this weekend.

Blake will stay home next week with Madi, who, Prater says, will be glued to the TV.

Shell probably be a nervous wreck if I make a bogey or something, Prater said. I already told her thats going to happen. Its Pinehurst.

Regardless of how many bogeys he ends up carding, Prater is just happy to be fulfilling a lifelong dream a dream, he admits, was probably a dream that you pretty much think is out of reach.

Only now it is.

Prater was already thinking about potential practice-round pairings. He would especially love to play with reigning U.S. Open champion and Colorado native Wyndham Clark, whom Prater competed against when he was younger.

I dont know, Im going to be starstruck by 60 of the dudes who are there, Prater said. Maybe Ill just wait on the first tee for hours and see if theres an opening.

He'll have plenty for conversation.

And who knows? Maybe he'll teach the pros a thing or two.

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Meet the 29-year-old biology teacher who will compete at Pinehurst - Yahoo Sports

Biology

Internal clock helps cyanobacteria sustain life on this planet – The Source – Washington University in St. Louis

Most organisms on this planet rely on an internal circadian clock to function properly. New research published by biologists at Washington University in St. Louis investigates the function of the clock in nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria: microbes that exhibit unique metabolic traits but that have been difficult to pin down because of their genetic complexity.

Cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years. They played a large role in changing the Earths environment from oxygen-free to oxygen-rich. These organisms are of immense importance in the global carbon and nitrogen cycle, according to Himadri Pakrasi, a George William and Irene Koechig Freiberg Professor in biology in Arts & Sciences.

Up until now, researchers have been unable to dissect the clock function in cyanobacteria. But a new study from the Pakrasi lab published in May in Nature Communications uses a particular nitrogen-fixing bacterium, Cyanothece 51142, that can be genetically manipulated to study the effects of circadian cycles.

The researchers findings reveal how internal clocks in cyanobacteria help them separate the seemingly conflicting processes of photosynthesis a process that requires sunlight and produces oxygen from nitrogen fixation, which needs an environment without oxygen.

Photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation are two fundamental bioenergetic processes that are crucial for the sustenance of life on this planet, Pakrasi said. These pioneering findings have certainly paved the way for further research in this direction.

Read more on the Department of Biology website.

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Internal clock helps cyanobacteria sustain life on this planet - The Source - Washington University in St. Louis

Biology

NSF Awards $12.5M to Duke Researchers and Colleagues to Explore Polyploidy – Duke University School of Medicine

A new $12.5 million National Science Foundation grant was awarded to Duke University School of Medicine researchers and colleagues to investigate biology common to cancer, agriculture, biodiversity and more.

It's called polyploidy, and only within the last few years have biologists begun to recognize its significance across the tree of life.

Polyploidy packs cells and organisms with extra sets of genetic material. Its found in organisms all over the planet and in the cells of essentially every human organ system, said Don Fox, PhD, professor of pharmacology & cancer biology and cell biology who leads Dukes effort in the multi-institution project.

Fox is one of 18 scientists working to establish the Polyploidy Integration and Innovation Institute. The grant is part of a broader initiative by the NSF to bring together scientists from disparate areas of expertise to work on pressing problems in biology.

The University of Florida and the Florida Museum will lead the project, collaborating with institutions including Duke, Cornell University, University of Kentucky, University of Minnesota, University of Mississippi, University of Pittsburgh, and the Ghent University and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research.

Foxs laboratory will study polyploidy in an animal model -- the fruit fly.

We dont know much about how polyploidy impacts biological processes. To answer this fundamental question, we needed a team approach, Fox said.

This NSF award enables Fox to combine his efforts in flies with colleagues in the U.S. and Europe, who will add studies in plants, algae, and fungi to the collaborative effort. Polyploidy is a perfect topic for this sort of integration, said plant biologist Pam Soltis, PhD, a curator at the Florida Museum and lead investigator on the project. Researchers with the institute will study the effects of polyploidy in plants and animals, from entire ecosystems down to organs and cells.

We want to conduct a set of experiments that is consistent across organisms, said Doug Soltis, PhD, professor at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Department of Biology at the University of Florida. This is the first time well be able to determine whether there are consistent rules that govern polyploidy.

The institute will use new and unique data management tools and prioritize community engagement to gain as much insight as possible, with eventual applications to agriculture, medicine, and conservation.

The institute will guide high school curriculum development and teacher training, provide research experiences for undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers and offer training in science communication, while hosting local and international research conferences, said Pam Soltis.

At its most basic, polyploidy just means having more than the normal pair of matching chromosomes. Typically, when plants and animals undergo sexual reproduction, two sets of chromosomes one from each parent combine to create a new organism.

Humans have been aware of this concept since the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel established the foundation of genetic inheritance by conducting experiments with pea plants. But occasionally, this process goes awry, and instead of a pair of chromosomes, offspring are endowed with additional chromosome sets in a process called genome duplication.

This happens frequently in plants, and for several decades, botanists were the only ones who took a significant interest in the subject. The process can be so prevalent that some plants carry around eight or more chromosome pairs packed tightly in their cells. What is the utility of all this extra genetic material? Scientists once thought it didnthave much use at all. Then they discovered it was one of the most common ways new species are formed.

According to Soltis, theyre still learning this. My own view is there are hundreds of thousands of cryptic polyploid species that we have never recognized or scientifically named.

For reasons that remain unclear, polyploidy also seems to be stratified on a global scale. There are fewer known polyploid species in the tropics than there are in colder regions, and the incidence of genome duplication appears to be higher at increased elevations.

It may also have serious implications for how well plants are able to cope with rapid climate change.

Biologists later discovered that polyploidy wasnt just restricted to plants. Animals had it too. Nearly everything with a backbone can trace its origin to double genome duplication events that took place more than 450 million years ago. Similar duplications have occurred in fish, worms, insects, arachnids and mollusks.

Polyploidy is everywhere, Soltis said. Its a giant iceberg, and were at the very tip.

Scientists next discovered that polyploidy did much more than increase biodiversity. Its also an important part of the way many plants and animals function or malfunction. Polyploidy is present in roughly 37% of cancer types in humans. In other types, scientists think induced polyploidy may even provide a cure.

Polyploidy pops up in various organs as well, where it plays a significant role.Weve contributed to the finding that polyploidy promotes significant organ regeneration said Fox, who co-directs Dukes Regeneration Center. And recently we collaborated with Dawn Bowles, PhD, in the Duke Department of Surgery and Nenad Bursac, PhD, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering to show that polyploidy shapes the chambers of the heart in both flies and humans. This means that polyploidy may play a critical role in sculpting not only the heart but many other organs.

The medical community began realizing the importance of polyploidy in the early 2000s, but they were largely unaware that other biologists had been intently focused on the topic for many decades. A series of scientific conferences devoted entirely to polyploidy helped bring everyone together.

Its a case of not seeing what you dont look for. We were all siloed, and there was a lot of surprise when people learned about what others were doing, Soltis said.

Just as genetics became its own field of study that transcended biological boundaries after Mendel laid out the laws of inheritance, polyploidy is poised to become a new specialty, one ripe for discovery and innovation. The Polyploidy Integration and Innovation Institute will help make this happen.

In addition to Duke, the University of Florida, and the Florida Museum, other collaborating institutions are Cornell University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Minnesota, the University of Mississippi, the University of Pittsburgh, Ghent University and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research.

Content adapted from University of Florida.

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NSF Awards $12.5M to Duke Researchers and Colleagues to Explore Polyploidy - Duke University School of Medicine

Biology

Study adds new sea cucumber species to the research toolbox – EurekAlert

image:

Larva of the sea cucumber, Holothuria tubulosa, showing nuclei (cyan) and actin (magenta).

Credit: Perillo et al, Front. Ecol. Evol. 2024

By Devon McPhee

WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- Scientists have a handful of standard research organisms, including fruit flies and mice, that they use to study the evolutionary development (evo-devo) of animal lineages over time. Yet the more research organisms they can study, the deeper our understanding of life and the more knowledge we have to advance biomedicine and ecological conservation.

Researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, and the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (SZS) in Naples, Italy, have added to the evo-devo toolbox by establishing Holothuria tubulosa, a species of sea cucumber, as an experimental research organism. They published their protocols recently in Frontiers in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.

The sea cucumber, found abundantly in the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern Atlantic Ocean, is an echinoderm, a group of marine invertebrates that includes sea urchins, sea stars and sand dollars. Some species of echinoderms have been used as developmental models for over a century thanks to their low costs, high fecundity, optically clear larvae and, more recently, amenability to genetic studies.

Echinoderms are the closest invertebrates to humans genetically, which means we have most of our genes in common. If we understand how those genes function in an echinoderm, than we also know how they function in humans, said Margherita Perillo, a research scientist at MBL who led the study.

Sea cucumbers also have attributes and special skills such as being deposit feeders, which cleans the ocean floor, and the ability to completely regenerate their whole body that could be useful in conservation and biomedicine, she said.

The first step in establishing H. tubulosa as a research organism was to develop a protocol to efficiently produce embryonic cultures in a lab setting. Existing methods, including mimicking the animals natural breeding cycle and inducing the release of all the animals organs by evisceration (a behavior that sea cucumbers normally exhibit when threatened) were complicated, inefficient or both.

To overcome this, the team led by Rossella Annunziata (SZS) and Perillo pioneered a noninvasive technique to repeatedly harvest a small number of gametes (sperm and eggs) over a long period of time. The microsurgery involves a small incision near a sea cucumbers reproductive organs, allowing for the retrieval of testes or ovaries. The incision heals quickly and gives researchers the ability to harvest every few days from the same animal.

Since eggs retrieved using this technique have not reached maturation and cannot be fertilized, the researchers next expose the harvested ovaries to a synthetic peptide Thioredoxin-2 peptide, known to work in another species to make them receptive to sperm. They then grow the fertilized egg in a culture, where it reaches the metamorphosis stage in about eight weeks.

Our protocol removes a major bottleneck that has kept H. tubulosa from being used as a research organism and opens the door for more scientists to use it, Perillo said.

The team next used high-resolution microscopy coupled with immunohistochemistry to document the development of the larvae, with a focus on its unique structures. Their detailed description will serve as a foundation for future studies that aim to use genetic manipulations to functionally dissect development in H. tubulosa.

Additionally, they provided an example of how scientists can use echinoderm larvae to study the diversification of anatomical structures in closely related organisms. In this case, they used serotonin immunostaining to show how the location of serotonin neurons differed between types of echinoderms. Why and how this diversification occurs is an open question in evolutionary development biology.

Perillo received an Emerging Research Organisms grants from the Society of Developmental Biology to support her work and to continue her study of H. tubulosa.

The sea cucumber is a fascinating animal and the better we understand it, the more value it has as a research organism, said Perillo. My plan now is to develop genetic tools to help further characterize it as an emerging comparison model in evo-devo. At the same time, this collaborative work laid the foundation to establish a new sea cucumber species here at the MBL

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

Experimental study

Animals

Larval development of Holothuria tubulosa, a new tractable system for evo-devo

24-May-2024

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Study adds new sea cucumber species to the research toolbox - EurekAlert

Biology

Bruker Launches Transformative neofleX MALDI-TOF System for Spatial Biology Mass Spec Imaging (MSI … – BioSpace

ANAHEIM, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- At the 72nd ASMS meeting, Bruker Corporation (Nasdaq: BRKR) announced the launch of a novel, high-performance MALDI-TOF/TOF system, the neofleX Imaging Profiler for mass spectrometry-based tissue imaging. It enables facile OME-TIFF file output via the new SCiLS Scope software. The transformative neofleX MALDI-TOF/TOF MSI system now conveniently fits on a bench-top.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240603327426/en/

neofleX MALDI-TOF System for Spatial Biology Mass Spec Imaging (MSI) Applications (Photo: Business Wire)

The neofleX Imaging Profiler MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometer comes standard with Brukers proprietary 10 kHz smartbeam 3D laser for true pixel fidelity and with enhanced imaging detectors designed for longitudinal robustness, stability, and reproducibility in linear and reflector modes. neofleX is also available as a TOF/TOF configuration that features a reimagined fragmentation module for significantly improved TOF/TOF sensitivity, speed and sequence coverage.

Created for the unmet needs of moving from discovery imaging to translational and clinical tissue research, neofleX was used by the group of Prof. Bernd Bodenmiller at ETH and University of Zuerich to simultaneously map 116 proteins across a lung FFPE tissue section in 7 hours, using the MALDI HiPLEX-IHC workflow. Multiplexed detection with neofleX and MALDI HiPLEX-IHC technology allows increasing the number of proteins to map cellular processes without increasing MSI measurement time for a given region of interest.

In addition to MALDI HiPLEX-IHC MSI immunohistochemistry, neofleX is also compatible with the MALDI-ISH (in situ hybridization) method announced at ASMS 2024 by AmberGen, Inc. MALDI-ISH multiplexes imaging of up to 12 oligomers of interest (RNA/DNA) for multiomic spatial tissue research in neuroscience, infectious disease, and oncology.

The novel neofleX excels at providing more insight per pixel through multiomic spatial biology data from tissue sections that can positively correlate targeted proteins with glycans, metabolites, lipids, endogenous peptides, xenobiotics, and now RNA/DNA. This additional multiomics context provides important adjacency information about cellular states, function, structure, and protein activity for a range of research areas, such as oncology and neurology.

Professor Carsten Hopf of the University of Mannheim, Germany, Center for Mass Spectrometry and Optical Spectroscopy (CeMOS) commented: The innovative neofleX presents an incredibly powerful, versatile and easy-to-use mass-spec imaging system for tissue spatial biology researchers for targeted proteomics. We appreciate the value of this instrument for performance and versatility, and our clinical research collaborators welcome the translational research capabilities.

Multiomic co-localization of lipids and glycans on a tissue section allows to not only localize protein targets using MALDI HiPLEX-IHC, but also assess protein activity and function. A study performed at CeMOS on brain tissues from a transgenic mouse model demonstrated co-localization of amyloid -42 (A42) protein with a targeted membrane-bound glycosphingolipid (GM3 d36:1), yielding important structural information.

Dr. Michael L. Easterling, Vice President MSI for Brukers Life Sciences Mass Spectrometry division, commented: The neofleX offers unique combination of outstanding performance, multimodal software and workflows on the benchtop for a wide range of biopharma and clinical researchers. Additionally, neofleX brings novel capabilities to spatial biology, including spatial proteomics combined with unique multiomics correlations for developing actionable biological insights.

The neofleX is compatible with Brukers MALDI Imaging software and consumables ecosystems, such as IntelliSlides and SCiLS autopilot that simplify sample tracking, preparation, and analysis and require minimal input from users to initiate and process automated mass-spec imaging runs. For ease of collaborations, the neofleX now delivers targeted imaging data via automatically generated OME-TIFF images that can be viewed within the SCiLS environment, or easily exported into custom pipelines or digital pathology systems.

Bruker also announced extension of the SCiLS portfolio with SCiLS Scope 1.0 for collaboration around targeted, multiomic translational workflows developed for neofleX. SCiLS Scope software supports OME-TIFF datasets from targeted imaging workflows such as MALDI HiPLEX-IHC. Ion images are visualized by false-color coding of selected channels, and image processing and distance measurements can be accomplished with simple tools.

Blaine R. Roberts, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Department of Neurology at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, summarized: Fast and user-friendly visualization of targets is made easy by the addition of SCiLS Scope to the MSI software lineup.

About Bruker Corporation the Emerging Leader of the Post-Genomic Era (Nasdaq: BRKR)

Bruker is enabling scientists and engineers to make breakthrough post-genomic discoveries and develop new applications that improve the quality of human life. Brukers high-performance scientific instruments and high-value analytical and diagnostic solutions enable scientists to explore life and materials at molecular, cellular, and microscopic levels. In close cooperation with our customers, Bruker is enabling innovation, improved productivity, and customer success in post-genomic life science molecular and cell biology research, in applied and biopharma applications, in microscopy and nanoanalysis, as well as in industrial and cleantech research, and next-gen semiconductor metrology in support of AI. Bruker offers differentiated, high-value life science and diagnostics systems and solutions in preclinical imaging, clinical phenomics research, proteomics and multiomics, spatial and single-cell biology, functional structural and condensate biology, as well as in clinical microbiology and molecular diagnostics. For more information, please visit http://www.bruker.com.

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Bruker Launches Transformative neofleX MALDI-TOF System for Spatial Biology Mass Spec Imaging (MSI ... - BioSpace

Biology

Coral in New England? Yes, And It’s Rugged – College of the Holy Cross

In May, McAlister and Kelly Wolfe-Bellin, senior lecturer and director of biology laboratories, led a team of students from various academic disciplines to Bermuda to investigate and consider how societies and communities manage energy, water, food, waste management, nature, conservation, and environmental changes.

The students had to think about the decisions or tradeoffs that needed to be made about how resources would be generated and used. Those decisions might be different on a small island like Bermuda than what they would be coming from a big country like the U.S., he noted.

As a researcher, McAlister studies how natural and man-made environmental changes impact the biology and life history decisions made by organisms. Specifically, what these changes mean for marine invertebrates and their larvae, including classic sea creatures like cnidarians (corals, sea anemones and jellyfish) and echinoderms (sea urchins, sea stars and brittle stars).

When thinking about what is more important in controlling how an organism develops and grows, it used to be a battle between nature versus nurture, he said. Its actually both things together that lead to the development of the organism. That's true for humans just as much as it is true for every other organism.

An example of a brittle star.

While conducting doctoral research in Panama, he focused on species of echinoderms that lived in the Pacific Ocean and had cousins thriving in the Caribbean, separated only by about 50 miles of land and three million years of marine evolution. They experienced different food sources, water temperatures and predators, and had to make tradeoffs in order to survive: lay more and smaller eggs in the Pacific or fewer and larger more robust eggs in the Caribbean in order to thrive in their different marine environments. McAlister researched how the invisible-to-the-naked-eye larvae adapted to the changes.

When I talk to people about sea stars they have this mental image of an adult sea star. Thats not what the babies look like. They look like aliens, are microscopic and more sensitive [to environmental change] than the adults, and float around in the ocean water [instead of crawling along the seafloor]. Nobody's thinking about them, except for the few of us that do, McAlister said.

That is until there is a marine catastrophe, like warming oceans or a pollution event. Its the babies that are often killed off or most affected, McAlister said.

A jellyfish larvae moves through collected seawater.

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Coral in New England? Yes, And It's Rugged - College of the Holy Cross

Biology

Biden judicial nominee can’t say whether chromosomes determine sex: ‘I have never studied biology’ – Washington Times

One of President Bidens judicial nominees is under scrutiny for refusing to answer whether chromosomes determine ones biological sex, insisting that she never studied biology and is unqualified to answer.

Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn pleaded innocence of the question when asked it in a written questionnaire by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Is it possible to determine a persons sex by only analyzing their chromosomes? the South Carolina Republican asked the nominee.

I have never studied biology and therefore I am unqualified to answer this question, Judge Netburn said.

The back-and-forth came in the form of written follow-up questions following the nominees confirmation hearing last month.

During the May 22 hearing, Republican senators quizzed Judge Netburn over her decision to transfer a biological male child sex abuser to a female prison after the inmate decided to identify as a woman.

Her decision to move the prisoner conflicted with the recommendation from the Bureau of Prisons.

The inmate had been convicted of raping two children: a 17-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. The inmate was also convicted of distributing child sex abuse material.

Judge Netburn has been a magistrate judge for more than a decade.

She was nominated by Mr. Biden to serve as a federal judge for the Southern District of New York.

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Biden judicial nominee can't say whether chromosomes determine sex: 'I have never studied biology' - Washington Times

Biology

Fish in schools have an easier time swimming in rough waters – EurekAlert

image:

A school of pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) in upper Nimpkish River, British Columbia, Canada.

Credit: Fernando Lessa (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Swimming through turbulent water is easier for schooling fish compared to solitary swimmers, according to a study published June 6th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Yangfan Zhang of Harvard University, Massachusetts, US, and colleagues.

Locomotion is key to many aspects of animal behavior, from reproduction to feeding to migration, and so many species have developed adaptations to make moving around more efficient. In this study, Zhang and colleagues propose the turbulent sheltering hypothesis, which suggests that traveling in schools allows fish to shield each other from disruptive water currents, thus making it easier to swim through rough waters.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers ran trials with giant danios (Devario aeqipinnatus), observing these fish swimming alone or in groups of eight in both turbulent and steadily flowing water. High-speed cameras allowed researchers to observe the movements of the fish as they swam, and a respirometer allowed for measurements of fish respiration rates and energy expenditure.

These trials revealed that schooling fish expended up to 79% less energy while swimming in turbulent water compared to solitary fish. Schooling fish also clustered more closely together in turbulent water compared to steady water, while solitary fish had to beat their tails much more vigorously to maintain the same speed in more turbulent currents.

These results lend support to the turbulence sheltering hypothesis, indicating that locomotion efficiency might be a driving factor behind the evolution of schooling behavior. This information is valuable for understanding fish ecology, fundamentals of hydrodynamics and it might also be applied to the design and maintenance of habitats meant to harbor protected fish species or to hinder invasive ones. The authors note that future studies might build off of these findings to explore energy dynamics of group movements in further aquatic or aerial animals.

The authors add, What is the function of schooling behaviour in fishes? We show that being in a school substantially reduces the energetic cost for fish swimming in a turbulent environment, compared to swimming alone, providing support for the hypothesis that schooling behaviour protects individual fish from the increased energetic cost associated with swimming in turbulence.

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In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002501

Citation: Zhang Y, Ko H, Calicchia MA, Ni R, Lauder GV (2024) Collective movement of schooling fish reduces the costs of locomotion in turbulent conditions. PLoS Biol 22(6): e3002501. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002501

Author Countries: United States

Funding: Funding provided by the National Science Foundation grant 1830881 (GVL), the Office of Naval Research grants N00014-21-1-2661 (GVL), N00014-16-1-2515 (GVL), 00014-22-1-2616 (GVL), and a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC PDF - 557785 2021) followed by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship (202309BPF-510048-BNE-295921) of NSERC & CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) (YZ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Experimental study

Animals

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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Fish in schools have an easier time swimming in rough waters - EurekAlert