UI biologist studies ocean plant cell adaptation in climate change

How will plant cells that live in the oceans and serve as the basic food supply for many of the world's sea creatures react to climate change?

A University of Iowa biologist and faculty member in the Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics and his colleagues came one step closer to answering that question in a paper published in the April 9 issue of the journal Science.

Debashish Bhattacharya, professor of biological sciences in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is studying a tiny (about one micrometer in diameter) and diverse group of organisms called picoeukaryotes. So far, he has found that organisms from two isolated groups of the genus Micromonas -- which thrive in ecosystems ranging from tropical to polar -- look the same, but have evolved to contain different gene pools.

Bhattacharya said that understanding how these organisms change involves many issues.

The question, he said, is: "How do photosynthetic cells in the world's oceans recognize and adapt to their ever-changing environment and how will their latent abilities allow them to respond to climate change that will result in increased stratification and lower nutrient levels in the upper productive zone in oceans?

"To understand these complex issues, investigators need to generate gene catalogs from dominant plant organisms and understand how their genomes have evolved to thrive in vastly different oceanic regions ranging from near-shore to open ocean environments."

He said that the lead author of the Science article, Alexandra Z. Worden of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and collaborators, addressed these key issues in oceanography by sequencing to completion the nuclear genome of two globally distributed, bacterial-sized green algae named Micromonas. One isolated sample (RCC299) came from tropical waters in the Pacific Ocean, whereas the other (CCMP1545) came from temperate Atlantic coastal waters off Plymouth, England.

"These picoeukaryotes are indistinguishable using cell morphology but turn out to be enormously different at the genome level," Bhattacharya said. "On average, these isolates share only 90 percent of the roughly 10,000 genes each contains, indicating they comprise distinct species. More remarkable is the finding of novel repeated sequences that have spread into genes of Atlantic sample that are completely missing in the Pacific sample."

He said that it is unclear how these ubiquitous elements originated or what their function might be in the Atlantic sample, but their presence demonstrates the distinct genomic trajectory that the two species have taken.

"Overall the genomes of these Micromonas species show clear indications of selection acting on the gene pool with each containing a set of unique genes acquired by horizontal gene transfer that are not shared with the other," he said. "These genes likely hold clues to how each species has adapted to its own specific marine environment."

"The work highlights the extent to which genomic diversity is hidden by a simple, shared morphology and points to the need to decipher gene functions in Micromonas to understand their role in adapting to regimes that define myriad marine environments," he said.

Genome sequencing was done by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Research in Bhattacharya's lab was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

STORY SOURCE: University of Iowa News Services, 300 Plaza Centre One, Suite 371, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-2500
MEDIA CONTACT: Gary Galluzzo, 319-384-0009, gary-galluzzo@uiowa.edu

The Department of Biology is pleased to announce the availability of several scholarships for Biology undergraduates. Please follow the link for more information.

The Department of Biology faculty member, Debashish Bhattacharya has been awarded the distinction of the 2007 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A Professor in Biology, Bhattacharya is also a faculty member of the Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics and director or the UI Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in genetics. Professor Bhattacharya was given the fellowship "for fundamental studies of the origin and spread of photosynthetic organelles through endosymbiosis, genome evolution and phylogeny of microbial eukaryotes, and group I intron evolution". Bhattacharya, who received his doctorate in 1989 from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, joined the UI faculty in 1997. He currently has a two-year, $2 million National Science foundation (NSF) grant to research how early plant cells developed the ability to make use of sunlight through photosynthesis.

The Department of Biological Sciences would like to welcome 3 new graduate students, Erin Bailey, Stephen Butcher, Sarah Derry. Erin Bailey is a former University of Iowa Biology major that graduated in May 2005 with a BS in Biological Sciences. Since graduating, Erin was employed at Tyson Foods in the Quality Control Laboratory as a Lab Chemist/Microbiologist. Stephen Butcher graduated from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse in May 2007 with a BS in Biology. While at UW, he worked on several independent research projects, one under the guidance of a former doctoral student of ours who is now an Associate Professor of Biology at UW-La Crosse: Anne Galbraith. Sarah Derry graduated from Iowa State University in May 2004 with a BS in Genetics. She also received training for a teaching certificate at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. Until coming to the The University of Iowa, Sarah worked as a high school science teacher in the Houston Independent School District. Before a student is selected to join our program, their previous academic history is checked by a committee of departmental professors and graduate program advisors. The new students are chosen from among hundreds of other applicants to come for a campus visit. After the campus visit, they are invited to join our program. Welcome to all of our new graduate students!

The laboratory of Christopher Stipp, assistant professor in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Biological Sciences, recently received two grants totaling more than $800,000 to study how tumor cells migrate. The first grant is a four-year, $703,000 grant from the American Cancer Society, while the second is an 18-month, $110,610 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense.

The unique laboratory of Dr. David Soll at the University of Iowa, Department of Biological Sciences is making a big footprint in the field of cancer research, thanks to a new agreement reached between Soll and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. The NCI and its $104 million Clinical Protoemics Technologies Inititiative for Cancer (http://proteomics.cancer.gov) recently selected the Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank (DSHB) as the worldwide distributor of cancer-fighting proteins, called monoclonal antibodies, and the specialized cells, called hybridoms, that produce them. The DSHB was moved in 1995 from Johns Hopkins University to the laboratory of Dr. David Soll, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver/Emil Witschi Professor in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Biological Sciences.

The Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics, located within the Department of Biological Sciences, has purchased a Flow Cytometer. After testing several machines, the Cell Lab Quanta SC manufactured by Beckman Coulter was chosen. It is equipped with a blue laser (488nm) and a UV light source optimized for excitation at 366, 405, 435nm. It is also equipped with a Multi-Platform Loader which will allow the use of vials and 96-well plates. With this set-up we will be capable of detecting cell staining of labeled markers as well as measuring DNA content and ploidy level.

Professor Barbara Stay will be giving a Saturday Scholars talk on Saturday, September 1, 10:00am in room 40 Schaeffer Hall. Her presentation will discuss Termites and their social interaction. Termites, like bees, ants and humans, are social creatures. We, and they, depend on interactions of individuals within families and colonies for continued existence. Not only we humans, but these social insects have enormous impact on our habitat, the Earth. How do these insects, one millionth of our size do this? It is by enormous numbers of individuals who sacrifice reproduction for the benefit of the colony. In termites, a queen and her king, the primary reproductives, produce enormous numbers of offspring that develop into different castes. Workers provide food and care, not only for the king and queen, but also for the soldiers, defenders of the colony. Chemical communication between caste members maintains the composition of the colony for the benefit of the whole. The termites studied in the Stay laboratory is the local subterranean termite Reticulitermes flavipes in which developmental pathways are very flexible; workers, if need be, can develop into soldiers or into supplementary reproductives. Our interest is in how the social environment is communicated through the brain to the endocrine system that regulates developmental pathways and reproductive ability.

Biological Sciences Professor Emeritus, Jerry Kollros died on June 8, 2007 after a long battle with cancer. He was 89 years old. Kollros came to the University of Iowa in 1946 as an Assistant Professor. He served as Acting Chairman of the Department and then Chairman of the department from 1954 to 1977. During these years, he taught many Biology courses, had an active research lab devoted to neurodevelopment in amphibians and led the department through many years of changes. See the whole story.

Joshua Weiner, assistant professor in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, has received a three-year, $309, 510 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust to study the role of glial cells in neuro-transmission and various brain disorders. In particular, he and his colleagues will study the function of glial cells - cells that provide nutrition, protection and other support to neuronal cells and participate in signal transmission in the nervous system.

The research laboratory of Christopher Stipp, assistant professor in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, has received a three-year, $349,825 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust to study an aspect of cell behavior that plays important roles both in normal cell development and in tumor cell progression.

John M. Logsdon Jr., assistant professor in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of Biological Sciences and the Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics, has received a three-year, $347,340 grant from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust to study the evolution of sex and meiosis in fungi. The study would be an important milestone in understanding sexual reproduction by providing the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution of genes needed for sex in eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are cells with nuclei, including those found in plants, animals and fungi.

A University of Iowa, Department of Biological Sciences faculty member and member of the Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics will use a two-year, $1,973,449 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to research the answer. Debashish Bhattacharya, principal investigator, associate professor of biological sciences in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and director of the UI Interdisciplinary Program in Genetics, will sequence, or map, the genome of a key, single-celled organism.

The University of Iowa Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank (DSHB), under the direction of Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver/Emil Witschi Professor David Soll, has announced that it will provide a gift toward the Graduate Student Endowment in the Department of Biological Sciences of a minimum of $250,000 over the next five years. The endowment will help expand graduate student research within the department.

University of Iowa Biologist, Debashish Bhattacharya, Ph.D., has received a grant from NIH to study "red tide". Red Tide is the ecologically and financially costly biological phenomenon that periodically kills millions of fish and shellfish along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

The Roy J. Carver Center for Comparative Genomics has moved!! The Center is still in the Biology Building but has moved from the 2nd floor to the 1st floor. This move allows the Center to consolidate all equipment, including imagers, real-time PCR, sequencing and microarray equipment, into a single space. Samples for DNA sequencing can be dropped off in room 101 BB or 107 BB.

University of Iowa Assistant Professor of Biology, John Logsdon, along with other UI researchers, made a discovery that earned them national attention earlier this year.   Logsdon and his colleagues found that a single-celled organism called Giardia, once thought to reproduce asexually, may actually have sex. Sexual reproduction has not been directly proven yet, but the UI researchers studied the DNA of Giardia and concluded that the organism has genes necessary for sexual reproduction.

View the Fall 2005 Departmental Newsletter either online or download a copy. This file is in PDF format and requires Acrobat Reader. (23 MB)

View the October 2004 Departmental Newsletter either online or download a copy. This file is in .pdf format and requires Acrobat Reader. (23 MB)

The University of Iowa Herbarium, an important collection both historically and with respect to its representation of Iowa plant diversity, has recently been merged with the Ada Hayden Herbarium at Iowa State University. The combined collections contain approximately 640,000 specimens, and together have the largest and most complete holdings representing the flora of Iowa. The unified herbarium also contains important holdings of Midwestern flora. Please contact Lynn Clark (lgclark@iastate.edu), Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011-1020, for further information.

The online advising tool created to assist students in building their class schedules. Check it out here!

The Offices of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Genetics have moved to the Department of Biological Sciences.

Biology faculty member Debashish Bhattacharya has assumed the leadership of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Genetics at the University of Iowa. This is one of the largest interdisciplinary programs at the University with over 50 faculty members and 40 graduate students. The move to Biological Sciences is anticipated to forge strong ties between the faculty here and in the College of Medicine and other participating Colleges. Joining Debashish are Program Associate Anita Kafer and Secretary Chloe Allgood. Offices are located on the 3rd floor of the Biology Building (BB) at Jefferson and Dubuque Streets.