Maria Servedio (left) and former UNC undergraduate John Powers (right) are authors of an article in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), titled “Evolution of sexual cooperation from sexual conflict”.  Along with Russell Lande (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Trevor Price (University of Chicago), they show how male displays that exploit preexisting biases in females to elicit extra investment in the brood can resolve evolutionary into a cooperative system where the display is necessary for females to invest optimally. In this way displays may become evolutionarily trapped, potentially accounting for the very common phenomenon of display after pairs have already formed. Read more >>

Congratulations to these UNC-CH students, enrolled as Biology majors and/or double majors, for their induction into Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society. At the induction ceremony, new members receive certificates and Phi Beta Kappa keys, the organization’s symbol. The new inductees are: Maximilian Jeremy Bazil, Natalie Rose Cohen, Janine Lee Corley, Alissa Lorann Davis, Kirstyn Danielle Evans, Laura Lee Folk, Julian Alexandre Gordon, Bryan Charles Grimes, Joshua David Hale, Collin Siva Hill, Katherine E Hoeg, Madison James, Salman Khan, Griffen Scott Kingkiner, Rachel Claire Locklear, Victoria Marie Lue, Olivia Grace Manning, Zachary Austin Martik, Rachel Eliane Maydew, Marissa Millard, Elisabeth Hannah Molnar, Samuel Yosef Omesi, Abigail Lemay Owens, Kelly Elizabeth Owens, Heerali Sandip Patel, Ranan Phookan, Wesley James Yount Price, Landon Graham Richardson, William Edward Saathoff, Emily Shen, Abtahi Rahman Tishad, Evelyn Rose Williams, Adhham Raed Zaatri, and Anastasia Danielovna Zeegers.

Congratulations to Department Chair Kerry Bloom for being named a ‘Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology’. “The ASCB Fellows award recognizes ASCB members who have made outstanding contributions to the field of cell biology and to the community of cell biologists through their service to ASCB.” Kerry joins the two previously named ASCB fellows from UNC: Ted Salmon and Keith Burridge.

Maria Servedio is a co-author, with former visiting student Yusan Yang and Dr. Cori Richards Zawacki from the University of Pittsburgh, of a paper in NATURE titled “Imprinting sets the stage for speciation”.  In this mix of models and experiments, the team showed that tadpoles of the strawberry poison frog (Oophaga pumillio) imprint on adult coloration, affecting both male aggression biases and female preferences, and that this combination allows the maintenance of two color morphs that mate assortatively.  Read More >>  News and Views >>

Dr. Gregory P. Copenhaver co-authored a paper in The Plant Journal with his collaborators at Pohang University and Cambridge University that is titled “DeepTetrad: high‐throughput image analysis of meiotic tetrads by deep learning in Arabidopsis thaliana”. The paper introduces a machine learning based image recognition and analysis platform for analyzing meiotic recombination in plants. This approach will enable new discoveries in the fundamental mechanisms of reproduction. Read more >>

Congratulations to Catherine Chen (Karin Pfennig’s grad student) who just had one of her papers from her undergraduate research featured prominently in the NY Times titled “It’s a Dirty Job, but Someone Has to Do It and Not Get Eaten”. The original Biology Letters publication is titled: “The cleaner shrimp Lysmata amboinensis adjusts its behaviour towards predatory versus non-predatory clients”.   Read NY Times story >>    Read Biology Letters paper >>

Congratulations to Ariel Pani (former Bob Goldstein lab postdoc) who started his own lab this fall as an Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Virginia. His current research explores the cellular and molecular underpinnings of long-range cell signaling using the worm C. elegans ​as a tractable model system.

Kale Hartmann (left) published an article in the September issue of GENETICS titled “Centromere-proximal meiotic crossovers in Drosophila melanogaster are suppressed by both highly repetitive heterochromatin and proximity to the centromere.” The article, which explores a phenomenon first described by George Beadle in 1932, was selected for issue highlights. James Umbanhowar (middle) is also an author. Kale recently completed her PhD in Jeff Sekelsky’s (right) lab, and is now Curriculum Fellow in Genetics and Genomics at Harvard Medical School. READ MORE >>

Congratulations to the Frank Conlon Lab, in collaboration with Ileana Cristea’s lab (Princeton University), for their recent publication in PLOS Biology titled “Conservation and divergence of protein pathways in the vertebrate heart”. This paper defines the protein composition, protein complexes and protein pathways of four model vertebrates used to study human heart disease. The study uncovers conserved and divergent protein pathways and providing insight into selection of appropriate model systems for either modeling human cardiac development or investigating human disease. READ MORE >>

Congratulations to Brian Taylor, whose paper titled “Bioinspired magnetoreception and navigation in nonorthogonal environments using magnetic signatures” has been accepted by the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. READ MORE >>