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“Weedy” Bird Species May Win as Temperatures Rise
Climate change is altering North American winter bird communities in ways that models currently favored by ecologists fail to predict.
Based on patterns of animals found in different climate zones today, ecologists would expect that as habitats warm, numbers of species found there will increase, and that those species will be smaller in size and restricted to narrower geographic ranges. Ecologists at the University of California, San Diego have found that only one of those three predictions has held for North American birds over the past quarter century.
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Biology Sweeps UCSD Alumni Awards
UCSD’s Alumni Association has selected three alumni honorees for this year’s annual Awards for Excellence and all three are graduates of the Division of Biological Sciences, a first in the 31-year history of this campus awards event.
The three award winners will be honored June 6 at the San Diego Marriott Del Mar for the annual Awards for Excellence, part of the UCSD Alumni Association’s inaugural Alumni Weekend.
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Academic Senate Teaching Awards
Associate professor James Nieh and graduate student Joe Fontana are among seven UC San Diego faculty members and two graduate students who have won awards this year from the Academic Senate for their extraordinary teaching.
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Strong Odor Flips a Neural Switch Between Attraction and Aversion
Even the most alluring scent can turn repellant when the smell is too strong, but how that switch between attraction and aversion gets flipped in the brain was unknown.
Now UC San Diego graduate student Julia Semmelhack and her advisor, biology professor Jing Wang, have identified sites in the fruit fly brain that separately determine whether the insects will approach or avoid the odor of rotting fruit.
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UC San Diego Assistant Professors Receive Hellman Faculty Fellows Awards
Colin Jamora and Emily Troemel are among 33 assistant professors at UC San Diego who have been named recipients of the 2009-2010 Hellman Faculty Fellows Awards to support their research and creative activities. The award program was established at UC San Diego through the generosity of Chris and Warren Hellman to provide financial support and encouragement to young faculty and enhance their progress toward tenure.
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Islands top a global list of places to protect
Rare and unique ecological communities will be lost if oceanic islands aren’t adequately considered in a global conservation plan, a new study by researchers in the Division of Biological Sciences and two universities in Germany has found. Although islands tend to harbor fewer species than continental lands of similar size, plants and animals found on islands often live only there, making protection of their isolated habitats our sole chance to preserve them.
Many conservation strategies focus on regions with the greatest biodiversity, measured by counting the number of different plants and animals. “Normally you want to focus on the most diverse places to protect a maximum number of species,” said Holger Kreft, a post-doctoral fellow in the division and one of the two main authors of the study, “but you also want to focus on unique species which occur nowhere else.”
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CIRM Awards $5 Million Early Translational Grant to UC San Diego Researcher
A stem cell researcher from the University of California, San Diego, Yang Xu, professor of biology, has been awarded a $5.16 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Fifteen Early Translational grants, totaling $67.7 million, were approved at the April 29 meeting of the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee to fund work that translates basic research into clinical cures.
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Martin Yanofsky named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Division of Biological Sciences professor Martin Yanofsky is among 3 faculty from the University of California, San Diego named Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 20th.
Yanofsky, chair of the Section of Cell and Developmental Biology, studies the genes that control flower and fruit development in the model plant system of Arabidopsis thaliana. Over the past two decades his lab has isolated many of the major regulatory genes that are required not only for the initiation of flowers but also for the development of the four types of flower organs: sepals, petals, stamens and carpels. In recent years his group has turned their attention to the fruit, where they have again used molecular and genetic approaches to identify and characterize important fruit development genes, leading to a model that explains the genetic interactions that determine the fruit’s structure. They are now extending this work an earlier phase of the plant life cycle: the development of the female reproductive tract where pollen fertilizes the ovules that will eventually become the seeds.
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2009 Herbert Stern Lecture: Control of Cell Fate and Body Growth in Drosophila
We are honored to announce that Ernst Hafen will give the 2009 Herbert Stern Lecture. Dr. Hafen has made revolutionary discoveries on the signaling pathways that regulate animal cell size and animal body size. He is an exciting and charismatic speaker, and is a major figure in European science, having served as President of the ETH in Zurich, one of the top research institutes in the world. The Stern Lecture will be held at 3pm on May 15, in room 1205 of the Natural Sciences Building, and is free and open to the public.
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2009 Stephen Kuffler Lectures
We are pleased to announce that Roger Tsien will give the 2009 Kuffler
Lectures. The Kuffler Lectureship recognizes the contributions of a
senior neuroscientist who has had a major impact on the field. The
development of fluorescent calcium indicators by Tsien was a
transforming contribution to neurobiology and revolutionized the study
of calcium signaling in neurons and other cells.
The lectures will be held on April 29th and 30th, at 4:00 pm, at
Skaggs auditorium, and are free and open to the public. The Kuffler
lectures are sponsored by the Neurobiology Section of the Division of
Biology and the Neurosciences Graduate Program.
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Regional Partnership to Develop Algal Biofuels Gets Backing of San Diego Leaders
San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders today joined UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, local scientists and industry leaders to announce their support for a regional partnership designed to develop innovative ways to turn algae into biofuels.
Speaking at a news conference on the UC San Diego campus, Mayor Sanders and others said the San Diego region, now home to more than 500 biotechnology companies, could become a major center for renewable energy development, as scientists from UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute and other local research institutions join with their industry counterparts in a broad-scale research effort to develop advanced transportation fuels from algae.
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Nature Matters Lecture: Climate Change and Southern California Ecosystems
Climate change will disturb ecosystems found here and in rest of California, posing a challenge for managers and policy makers. On April 30, Elsa Cleland will describe what we know about the coming changes how plant communities are likely to respond, and what we still need to find out in order to protect important natural habitats.
Only remnants of San Diego’s native ecosystem remain. Sliced into fragments by development, the aromatic sage scrub that once covered all of the coastal hills is well adapted to the long dry season and mild climate that has characterized the local climate for the past 14 million years.
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Nigel Crawford Presented Faculty Excellence Award
Crawford is being recognized for his exemplary work and dedication to the Division of Biological Sciences. For more than 20 years, Crawford has earned rave reviews that praise his captivating lectures and genuine interest in his students’ education and future. In addition to teaching undergraduate biology classes, Crawford has embraced the opportunity to teach freshman seminar courses on topics such as “Integrative Medicine” and “the American Diet,” using them as a platform to initiate and test new material for future courses. These seminars have earned him outstanding evaluations as well with 100 percent of his students recommending him as an instructor.
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Pioneering Geneticist Named Recipient of 2009 UCSD/Merck Life Sciences Achievement Award
A pioneer in the field of genetics will be awarded the 2009 UCSD/Merck Life Sciences Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of California, San Diego.
James F. Crow, an emeritus professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will receive the prestigious $25,000 award from UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences in recognition of his research achievements, his dedication in furthering his field and his efforts to broaden the public’s understanding of the implications of new discoveries in genetics.
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UC San Diego Biologists Discover a Protein Link to Wound Healing
Diabetes and eczema may appear to be two completely unrelated diseases. But UC San Diego biologists have uncovered what appears to be a crucial biochemical link between the two.
The scientists report in the March 26 issue of the journal Nature their discovery that a protein previously linked only to cell death, plays a critical role in the healing of wounds in laboratory mice. This protein, known as caspase 8, is deficient in humans with eczema, but produced in excess amounts by diabetics.
The researchers say their discovery may explain why many diabetics lack a normal wound response and suffer severe complications from minor cuts and scrapes, and why those with eczema exhibit a chronic inflammation of the skin that compromises its protective function.
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Biologists Discover Missing Piece of Plant Clock
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have identified a key protein that links the morning and evening components of the daily biological clock of plants.
Their discovery, detailed in the March 13 issue of Science, solves a longstanding puzzle about the underlying biochemical mechanisms that control plant clocks and could provide a new way to increase the growth and yield of agricultural crops.
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New Explanation for a Puzzling Biological Divide Along the Malay Peninsula
For most of the past few million years, the shallow ocean shelf surrounding the peninsula and islands of Malaysia and Indonesia has been exposed, creating a land area about the size of Europe. That habitat shrank dramatically each time sea levels rose.
“The ocean is coming from both sides repeatedly to squeeze things,” Woodruff said. “If you have the ocean edge coming back and forth more than 50 times around this little narrow area, you’ll compress the fauna and cause species to go extinct locally.”
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The other legacy of Charles Darwin
On this, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birthday, much is being said and written about evolution, natural selection and the conflict between religion and science. But Darwin's legacy is much more than the publication 150 years ago of the transformative ideas he put forth in “The Origin of Species.”
Darwin set an example for the scientists who followed him on how to observe and make sense of the natural world. He used rigorous experiments to confirm his ideas. And he showed us how to synthesize disparate concepts and data into coherent hypotheses. In other words, Darwin knew it was important that his discoveries generated testable predictions.
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Kit Pogliano Elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology
Biology Professor Kit Pogliano is one of 72 scientists recently elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Microbiology.
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Why Do Some Bird Species Lay Only One Egg? UC San Diego Study Offers Some Answers
Why do some species of birds lay only one egg in their nest, while others lay 10 or more?
A global study of the wide variation among birds in this trait, known as the “clutch size,” now provides biologists with some answers. The study, published in the current issue of the journal PLoS Biology, combined data on the clutch sizes of 5,290 species of birds with information on the biology and environment of each of these species.
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Discovery of Microbe in Roundworm Provides Animal Model for ‘Emerging Pathogen’
An international team of biologists has discovered a new species of microsporidia, a single-celled parasite of animals, in a roundworm used in genetic laboratories around the world.
The discovery, detailed in the current issue of the journal PLoS Biology, is a breakthrough for public health researchers who until now had been looking for a suitable laboratory model in which to study microsporidia–a class of emerging pathogens that can cause significant illness in humans.
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