Congratulations to Ann G. Matthysse and her lab undergraduates Stephanie Mathews, Camille Martin, Haylea Hannah, Eleanor Rodriguez-Rassi, and Hillary Samagaio for their paper that was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The paper is titled “Glycoside Hydrolase Genes are Required for Virulence of Agrobacterium tumefaciens on Bryophyllum deigremontiana and Tomaro.”  Read more >>

Congratulations to Frank Conlon (left) and his former student Lauren Waldren-Wasson (right) for their publication with William Pu (Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard University) in Nature Communications: “A reference map of murine cardiac transcription factor chromatin occupancy identifies dynamic and conserved enhancers”. Read more >>

Congratulations to Zhenyu Hao (a postdoc in Darrel Stafford’s Lab), whose paper titled “Vitamin K-dependent carboxylation of coagulation factors: insights from a cell-based functional study” was recently published in Haematologica. In this paper, he studied how vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors are properly modified in a cellular environment and how the naturally occurring mutations in coagulation factors affect this process. Read more >>

Congratulations to Dr. Gregory P. Copenhaver, who has been elected as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Founded in 1788, the society is the oldest biological society in the world, and it was at a meeting of the society in 1858 that Darwin first formally presented his theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, the society is engaged in promoting scientific communication and outreach. You can read more about the society here >>

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 >>