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Why do we sleep? Researchers propose an answer to this age-old question

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Sleep helps restore the brain’s operating system to a critical state, according to new findings from WashU researchers in biology and physics.

Birds have more than one way of adapting to extreme temperatures

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Photographing birds around the world is not just a hobby for Justin Baldwin. Baldwin is PhD candidate in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Baldwin’s enthusiasm for birds and photography is helping researchers around the world.

Frogs have been trying to mate with odd things for 220 million years

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Male frogs will sometimes try to mate with turtles or inanimate objects, and now there is evidence that the behaviour began deep in prehistory with the first frogs.

Life Can’t Get Much Hotter Than This The world’s most heat-adapted creatures could be subverting their own evolution.

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Relationships Between Temperature and Animals’ Sizes Has Been Clarified

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How birds adapt to extreme temperatures: Hint: There’s more than one way to cope

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Birds' beaks differ in shape and size. Because beaks have large surface area and are hollow, beaks influence the ratio of a bird's surface area to its volume. This ratio is critical for heat loss and can explain why animals' body sizes and shapes vary according to the temperature of their environment.

Targeting TBK1 to overcome resistance to cancer immunotherapy

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Despite the success of PD-1 blockade in melanoma and other cancers, effective treatment strategies to overcome resistance to cancer immunotherapy are lacking1,2. Here we identify the innate immune kinase TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1)3 as a candidate immune-evasion gene in a pooled genetic screen4.

Hummingbirds use torpor in varying ways to survive cold temps

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“Torpor is somewhere between a power nap and hibernation,” said Justin Baldwin, a PhD candidate in biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, first author of the new study published March 15 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

SEEDs leaders chosen to attend ecology conference

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Washington University in St. Louis sophomores Sam Ko and Dev Mukundan, both environmental biology majors, earned full scholarships to attend the SEEDS Leadership Meeting this month at the Arizona Institute for Resilient Environments & Societies at the University of Arizona.

Graduate students recognized for research excellence

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Faculty and university leadership selected Benjamin Noble, a fifth-year graduate student in political science, as the winner of the inaugural Dean’s Award for Graduate Research Excellence. Six additional graduate students were recognized as finalists.

Student-led biotech consulting group brings science beyond the bench

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In December 2010, a group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis decided to transform their relationship with science. They formed The Biotechnology and Life Science Advising Group (BALSA), a nonprofit scientific consulting group to connect academia and industry, give graduate students real-world experience in the business of science, and strengthen the startup community in St. Louis. In the 12 years that followed, they’ve done just that.

Awardees for graduate teaching excellence announced

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Eight Arts & Sciences graduate students were honored for their achievements in undergraduate teaching and instruction.

Congratulations to the Neuroscience Community Award Winners!

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Congrats to Professor Yehuda Ben-Shahar and grad student Adalee Lube on winning the Award for Excellence in Teaching which recognizes faculty members and students who have shown outstanding commitment to teaching in the neuroscience community.

Could soil microbes be a solution to the climate crisis?

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Special Report by Arpita Bose and Emily Davenport: Research from Arpita Bose’s lab combines nature with the laboratory to innovate solutions to our global climate crisis

Damato wins 2022 Ceil M. DeGutis Prize

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Congratulations to Anna Damato for being selected as the 2022 Ceil M. DeGutis Prize Fellow

More than a lab coat: how Project Biodiversify strives to humanize biology

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Representation in science matters. And that is why one group aims to increase the visibility of role models from underrepresented groups in biology courses. Project Biodiversify is creating a repository of teaching materials that enhance human diversity and inclusivity in biology courses while also humanizing biology to students who may aspire to be biologists. After Project Biodiversify presented a workshop at WashU, the biology department, inspired by their mission, got involved. Together with support from science writer Marta Wegorzewska, graduate student Mahal Bugay submitted a profile of Rita Levi-Montalcini, a former WashU faculty member.

Climate Change Is Shrinking Animals, Especially Bird-Brained Birds

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Baldwin: We're sampling only a small amount of the potential variation in relative brain size here in our study. And so that does suggest that even potentially small differences in relative brain size might actually have a large effect on ecological responses to climate change.

Big-Brained Birds Aren't Shrinking As Much With Climate Change

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Treehugger-- “We discovered that birds with large brains (relative to their body size) shrink less than birds with small brains, given the same amount of climate warming,” study co-author Justin Baldwin, a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, tells Treehugger.

Arts & Sciences graduate students selected for NSF research fellowships

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Students selected for the National Science Foundation (NSF) five-year Graduate Research Fellowship Program will receive both research funding and professional development opportunities.

Smaller-brained birds shrink in response to climate change, Wash U study finds

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Listen on STL Public Radio site: “We were really struck by how some species seem to be decreasing a lot more than others,” said study co-author, Justin Baldwin, a Ph.D. candidate with the Botero Lab at Washington University.

Decarbonization with microbial electrosynthesis

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Eric Conners, Arpita Bose and Prem Prabhakar at the Department of Biology, Washington University, discuss microbial electrosynthesis – a way of creating commercially significant bio-commodities

How birds are adapting to climate crisis-CNN

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(CNN) Thousands of birds die each spring and fall when they collide with Chicago's skyscrapers, which lie on a major migration path between Canada and Latin America. But the birds don't die in vain. Since the 1970s, many of them have been collected from the street and cataloged by the city's Field Museum. This unique and detailed set of data has been a scientific windfall, revealing that North American migratory birds appear to be shrinking in response to climate change. A new study of this data has highlighted an important nuance in this trend: Birds that have bigger brains, relative to their body size, are not shrinking as much as their smaller-brained counterparts.

Brainy birds may fare better under climate change

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“As temperatures warm, body sizes are decreasing,” said Justin Baldwin, a PhD candidate in the laboratory of Carlos Botero, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. “But larger-brained species are declining less strongly than small-brained species.”

Student of sleep: A profile of Lizzie Tilden

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In Hengen’s lab, Tilden “built this future-focused vision and turned that into a workable reality,” Hengen says, this time with an initiative to start a new line of scientific inquiry. Within weeks of starting in the lab, Tilden began an independent research project, collaborating with David Holtzman, MD, the Barbara Burton and Reuben M. Morriss III Distinguished Professor of Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine, to explore the relationship between Alzheimer’s disease and sleep/wake states.

First artificial scaffolds for studying plant cell growth

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Ryan Calcutt and Ram Dixit in Arts & Sciences collaborated with material scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Alabama State University through the Center for Engineering Mechanobiology to create the first artificial scaffolds that can support the growth of individual plants cells. Their new study is published Oct. 20 in Science Advances.

Missouri Wetlands Could Hold Smallest Weapon For Fighting Climate Change

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Members of a research team at Washington University made the discovery and are now studying the microbes to determine just how effective they could be in fighting climate change.

Wash U Biologist Explains How Lizards Evolved For Specialized Life In Trees

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Lizards are always teaching Aryeh Miller something new, even though the biologist has studied them for six years. As an ecologically, morphologically and evolutionarily diverse group, they help answer many questions regarding ecology and evolution, he explained on St. Louis on the Air.

Associate Professor Arpita Bose will be a faculty marshal in the graduate student ceremony on May 21st

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Learn while teaching: James Lucas wins Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence

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Lucas signed up as an MTE (Mentored Teaching Experience) for Braude’s Missouri's Natural Heritage course to satisfy a requirement, but quickly discovered that he enjoys teaching so much that he’s seriously considering becoming a biology professor at a liberal arts college post-graduation.

Association of Women Faculty honors Andreea Stoica with 2021 Annual Student Award

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PhD candidate Andreea Stoica has received the 2021 Annual Student Award from the Association of Women Faculty, which recognizes academic excellence and leadership potential among women students whose research, teaching, or service benefits women and gender minorities.

CEMB Students to Compete in 2021 Reach Out Science Slam Communication Challenge

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Graduate students in The Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB), Kari Miller, Elizabeth Haswell lab, and Ghiska Ramahdita, Guy Genin and Nathaniel Huebsch labs, have been named semifinalists in the 2021 Reach Out Science Slam Communication Challenge jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Museum of Science, Boston. Kari and Ghiska will be presenting original, three-minute science stories on their respective research in mechanobiology.

Communicating science with empathy and intention

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Sophia Hayes, professor of chemistry, is part of a growing movement at Washington University to offer students essential training in science communication.

Artwork from the ForestGEO Network

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Erin O’Connell is a field technician with the Myers Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) and is currently working on the second census of the ForestGEO plot at Tyson Research Center. She offers three tree-inspired works, complete with titles and context in the captions.

Local plant disease research during global pandemic

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Rare Iridescent Snake Discovered in Vietnam

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The international team of researchers surveyed karst forests in the summer of 2019 to learn more about northern Vietnam’s species diversity. The work supports the broader mission of the Global Genome Biodiversity Network: to sequence the DNA of as many species as possible within the next few years. This monumental effort depends on local fieldwork and collaborations across organizations. “When you see these species descriptions come out, they seem like a very small piece of the puzzle,” said lead author Aryeh Miller, a research fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and a graduate student at Washington University in St Louis. “But when everyone’s working on these smaller projects, it facilitates big, macro-evolutionary studies about the evolution of life.”

Going below the surface at Tyson Research Center

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Graduate student Rachel Becknell's research explores the important roles soil microbes play in prairie restoration. This summer, Tyson Science Communications fellow Josh Valeri worked remotely with Becknell to create a video detailing her work.

Elizabeth Mueller, graduate student in the Levin lab, wins the Nat L. Sternberg Thesis Prize.

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Elizabeth Mueller, graduate student in the Levin lab, wins the Nat L. Sternberg Thesis Prize.

Jordan Brock, grad student in Ken Olsen’s Lab received two new grants

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A $26k USDA grant: This project will involve a month-long expedition to France to collect wild Camelina species, including the newly described C. neglecta which is only known to occur in southern France.

The events of the COVID-19 pandemic according to a 4th-year grad student

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Each of us has a unique and personal experience with the COVID19 pandemic. I do not have children. I am not a healthcare worker or essential employee. I am still certain in my funding. While my family may be far away, they are healthy. I am not entering the job market, a furloughed employee, an early-career scientist, rotating first-year graduate student, or graduating senior. I want to acknowledge the difficulties faced by those in positions like the ones listed above, as well as many other hard-hit individuals I have not mentioned.

Whether cultivating roses or studying cassava, Black botanists are in the spotlight this week

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Daria McKelvey knew she wanted to work with plants from a young age. Kevin Cox Jr. thought he wanted to be a pediatrician until he learned that plants get sick, too. McKelvey, a supervisor at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Kemper Center for Home Gardening, and Cox, a postdoctoral fellow at the Danforth Plant Science Center, are among the St. Louisans being celebrated on social media during Black Botanists Week, which ends Saturday.

Arts & Sciences students, alumni among finalists for Skandalaris award

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Three start-ups founded by Arts & Sciences alumni and current students are finalists for the 2020 Global Impact Award from Washington University’s Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Here, the founders discuss their journeys from Arts & Sciences to entrepreneurship.

For This Colombian Scientist, Lizards Led To A Life Of Science!

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More than six percent of the Colombian population identifies as African-descended, but they are still proportionally under-represented in the ranks of Colombian science. But an important step in representation came in December 2019, with the announcement of biologist Jhan Salazar as the winner of the Young Afro-Colombian 2019.

Marshall Wedger, grad student in the Olsen Lab, wins Stephen J. O'Brien Award

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The evaluation committee had the following comments on this top-ranked article: "Nicely designed study of introgression between wild and domesticated rice strains, showing evidence for historic gene flow. Large sample size, and although small numbers of loci, well-tempered results and conclusions. Has important practical implications for human food security.” Marshall will receive a $2,000 prize, a certificate, and up to $1,500 toward expenses to attend and present a talk at the 2020 AGA President’s Symposium.

EEPB graduate student wins Afro-Colombian of the year award in the Youth category

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Washington University graduate student Jhan Salazar was recognized by the Colombian organization “Color de Colombia” as the Afro-Colombian of the year in the Youth category in a nationally televised ceremony in Colombia on December 2, 2019. The event was sponsored by El Espectador, a major newspaper in Colombia.

Missouri researchers study golf course grass to address agricultural challenges

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One billion hectares of land, an area about the size of the U.S., are affected by salty soil, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. The majority of crops are sensitive to salt, resulting in production declines that cost at least $27 billion each year, says a study published by the United Nations. “And it’s continually getting worse,” said David Goad, a doctoral candidate at Washington University. As agricultural fields are irrigated, water evaporates but salt doesn’t, producing saltier soils each year. These issues are particularly problematic in dry, hot climates, including the western U.S.

Graduate student wins two best poster prizes at a Gordon conference

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Dinesh Gupta, a graduate student in Aprita Bose's lab, wins two poster prizes Applied and Environmental Microbiology Gordon Research Conference.

Congratulations PhD graduates!

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Congratulations to our PhD graduates Cassondra Vernier, Zhen Peng, Dilys Vela, Chris Catano, Sam Powers, Michael Guzman, and Ben Wolf!

Biology students receive NSF Fellowships

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DBBS graduate student Kiona Elliott (Bart Lab, Plant & Microbial Biosciences Program) and past undergraduate Kate Harline (formerly of the Jez Lab, now at Cornell) received NSF Fellowships that provide three years of annual support for graduate studies.

The kids are alright: Family quarrels in seeds reveal the ways parents and offspring sometimes evolve in conflicting directions

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Plant seeds contain tissues that represent three distinct genetic relatives: the mother, the embryo and a bizarre triploid tissue called the endosperm that is involved in nutrient transfer from mother to embryo. Katherine Geist, a PhD candidate in the laboratory led by David C. Queller, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, and Joan Strassmann, the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology, used genomic data from the model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, to illuminate a dispute between these three parties over how much resources should be given to the embryo.

Specialist enzymes make E. coli antibiotic resistant at low pH

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“Some enzymes that appear to be redundant for bacterial growth and fitness under standard laboratory conditions are specialized for particular environmental conditions,” said Elizabeth Mueller, a PhD candidate and first author of the new study. “We probably miss a lot of interesting and clinically relevant biology by studying bacterial cells predominately during growth in nutrient-rich, neutral-pH, aerated-growth media.” Mueller found that a subset of enzymes involved in making E. coli ‘s cell wall are pH specialists that ensure robust growth and cell wall integrity in a wide pH range. The work was completed with collaborators at Newcastle University in Britain and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Warming pushes lobsters and other species to seek cooler homes

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Movement of species can drastically change a region’s food web, as well. Puffins live in the Gulf of Maine, along with lobsters. These birds prefer to eat herring, a fish that’s becoming less abundant. Butterfish, meanwhile, have moved in. “Unfortunately, butterfish don’t fit down the throat of a baby puffin very well,” Pinsky says. As a result, puffin chicks can starve to death. Such changes in the food web can have unforeseen effects. Amanda Koltz is an ecologist in Missouri, at Washington University in St. Louis. The animals she studies are in the Arctic, which “is warming really fast,” she notes. “It’s warming at about twice the rate of the rest of the planet.”

Outreach Projects at Claver House

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Jenny Shoots, a graduate student in the Haswell Lab, has worked with a group of volunteers in the Ville neighborhood of North St. Louis at Claver House for two years. For the past year, every Saturday morning the volunteer group hosts a Read and Feed program for young people in the neighborhood where kids can enjoy a pancake breakfast and take part in educational activities that promote literacy. The program has expanded from reading to other types of experiences promoting scientific learning. There are about 10-20 regulars that come every week excited to learn new things.

From Lab Bench to Stage: a McDonnell International Scholar's Journey to Winning the Three Minute Thesis Competition

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Graduate student and McDonnell International Scholar Po-Cheng Lin delivers the winning presentation at the Three Minute Thesis competition held at the McDonnell Academy 7th International Symposium in Beijing, China.

Preparing for the competition

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The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences teams up with university groups to help students in science, technology, engineering, and math land prestigious fellowships.

Ram Dixit named new co-director of the Plant and Microbial Biosciences

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“We train our students to do any type of science. We want to give them the tools so that whether they go into industry, academia or government, they will benefit from what they learned in graduate school,” said Dixit.

A New Species in Forest Park

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New species are not hidden only in exotic locales. Recently, graduate student Ben Wolf found a new species of alga in Forest Park.

Four Biology Students Awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships

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Arms races and cooperation among amoebae in the wild

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Wash U program aims to improve science education

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‘It’s reshaping the way I see teaching’

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