Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy have been featured in the advice section of InsiderHigherEd.com. Their article, authored with Calvin Sims, outlines more than a dozen ways in which white and non-Black educators of color can support the Black Lives Matter movement and create inclusive learning environments. Please read this very important article and work to make these changes in each classroom!
Congratulations to Lela Lackey (Alain Laederach’s Lab), the People’s Choice Winner for hackseq 2020. Hats off to team OpenASO led by Lela Lackey and her members for taking the cake and being crowned the bio-hackers supreme. The OpenASO team shall receive a $1,000 cash prize. You can read about all hackseq 2020 projects at https://www.hackseq.com/projects. Ivan Jimenez-Ruiz and Jayashree Kumar were also members of team openASO.
Congratulations to Dr. Gregory Copenhaver’s lab who, together with their collaborators at Fudan University in Shanghai, published a new study in PLOS Genetics. The paper reveals novel roles for SCC2 – a protein that helps hold chromosomes together during meiosis. The first author, Hongkuan Wang, was internationally co-advised by Dr. Copenhaver and the paper is the culmination of his Ph.D. work.
Read the article here.
Congratulations to UNC Biology’s Andrius Dagilis and Daniel Matute for their Perspective featured in Science magazine!
The article highlights a new paper by Dagilis and Matute which touches on important sights into the evolution of species barriers and hybrid incompatibility. Congrats!
Andrius Dagilis is a post-doc in the UNC Department of Biology and Daniel Matute is an assistant professor with a focus on genetic and ecological basis of reproductive isolation.
Check out the article here.
Follow the UNC Biology Department’s new Instagram: @uncbiology. Here, we will post all things UNC and biology, so make sure to follow to keep updated!
Congratulations to Jamie Antinori on being chosen as a Top 10 Scholar-Athlete for 2019-2020! These ten students, five male and five female, are the graduating student-athletes with the highest cumulative grade point averages.
As noted on the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes (ASPSA) website, Jamie is a member of the gymnastics team and is from Park City, Utah. She is majoring in Biology with minors in Chemistry and Neuroscience. Jamie has been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and has been on the Dean’s List each of her semesters at UNC. She has been conducting research on air pollution and lung health at the Alexis Lab in the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma and Lung Biology. After graduating this month, she will continue her work full time at the Alexis Lab while she is applying to medical school. In five years, she will be about to start her residency.
Jamie selected Biology’s Dr. Gidi Shemer as a faculty member that made a significant contribution to her academic and personal success! You can see more in the following video, including a special thank you from Jamie to Dr. Shemer. Congratulations to both!
Congratuations to Xuejie Chen, a postdoc in Darrel Stafford’s Lab who recently published a paper in Blood titled “A cell-based high-throughput screen identifies drugs that cause bleeding disorders by off-targeting the vitamin K cycle.” In this study, the authors adapted a cell-based screening approach to identify several drugs from the NIH Clinical Collection drug library that caused bleeding disorders by impacting the biosynthesis of active coagulation factors. The paper also explored the mechanisms of action and prevention of drug induced bleeding disorders.
Read more here: https://ashpublications.org/blood/article-abstract/doi/10.1182/blood.2019004234/454781/A-cell-based-high-throughput-screen-identifies?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Collin Hill, undergraduate majoring in Biology and Chemistry, presented his Honors Biology Thesis which focused on the very timely topic of virology. Collin summarizes his thesis:
“In this study, we examined three potentially mutagenic nucleoside analogs, N4-beta-hydrocytidine (NHC), Favipiravir, and Ribavirin using Primer ID with next-generation sequencing (NGS) on a panel of RNA viruses in cell culture, including MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV), Zika virus (ZIKV), and La Crosse virus (LACV). We found that NHC exhibited antiviral and mutagenic effects in each of the three viruses, supporting that this nucleoside analog is a broad-spectrum antiviral that acts through lethal mutagenesis. Favipiravir and Ribavirin was found to exhibit moderate antiviral and mutagenic effects in LACV only. Additionally, using a MERS-CoV mouse model, we found that an NHC prodrug (EIDD-2801) also exhibited the same antiviral and mutagenic effects in vivo and also found that there was no significant findings of cytotoxicity or increases in transcriptional error rates. However, an additional study of cytotoxicity of each of the three nucleoside analogs in a cell culture of 8E5 cells found that NHC at high dosage concentrations can significantly increase the transcriptional error rate of the cells, indicating misincorporation of NHC by eukaryotic RNA polymerases. The findings of this study support that these nucleoside analogs could potentially be able to be used to treat a wide variety of RNA viral infections in humans, including newly emerged viruses that lack other forms of treatment.”
Congratulations to Dr. Brain Taylor and undergraduate Sebastion Nichols (class of 2021) for winning the Summer Award for Research-Intensive Courses (SARIC) for Undergraduate Research for Summer 2020!
The Summer Award for Research-Intensive Courses is a tuition award offered for a wide range of Maymester and Summer Session I and II courses to give students the opportunity to enroll in research-intensive courses during the summer session. The award covers in-state tuition for one three-hour research-intensive course for the student and provides a $1000 stipend for faculty teaching the mentored undergraduate research course. Read more here.
Dr. Brian Taylor‘s laboratory studies bio and bioinspired navigation and orientation. They are particularly interested in animal magnetic reception (i.e., how do animals use the earth’s magnetic field to get from point A to point B). You can follow them on Twitter: @qbeslab.
Congratulations Sebastian and Dr. Taylor!
Congratulations to Keith Sockman and Allen Hurlbert for the article on their Avian Biology class featured on the Endeavors webpage! The article lauds the associate professors for their emphasis on fieldwork as the class visits wildlife reserves across the state throughout the semester.
Keith Sockman‘s lab studies the causes and consequences of reproductive decisions. Birds are an excellent system for this topic because their decisions are often easy to observe and apply across a broad range of taxa and habitats.
Allen Hurlerbt‘s lab asks questions about the structure of ecological communities, and the processes that are responsible for determining the patterns of diversity, composition, turnover and relative abundance both within local assemblages and across the globe.
Endeavors is the online magazine of research and creative activity at UNC-Chapel Hill. Endeavors (ISSN 1933-4338) is published by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Read the article here.