Pat Gensel and Alan Weakley received a 3 year NSF grant (Advanced Digitization of Biological Collections) to digitize parts of the critical fossil collections (all non-seed producing plant fossils) of Pat Gensel, as well as extant fern and lycophyte components of the UNC Herbarium (a unit of the NC Botanical Garden located in Coker Hall). The grant, Digitization TCN: Collaborative Research: The Pteridological Collections Consortium: An integrative approach to pteridophyte diversity over the last 420 million years, is a multi-institutional collaborative, led by U Cal Berkeley, with 8 collaborating institutions (UNC being one) and up to 30 associated institutions, forming the Pteridological Collections Consortium. The project focuses on integrating fossil (deep time) and extant data about ferns and lycophytes that will enable researchers to better address the ecology, biogeography, and evolution (characters and genes) of these plant groups through time, from the Devonian to the present and to develop greater public appreciation of these plants and topics. The images and data will be served in a new portal, representing the first such consortium to integrate fossil and living plant data in one database. The NSF-ADBC grant is the 4^th over the last 7 years that the UNC Herbarium (the largest in the southeastern United States) has received. The work facilitates research, collaboration, and conservation by vastly increasing the accessibility to researchers and the public of the mass of data held in herbaria like UNC’s.

Congratulations to Biology postdoctoral researcher Fletcher Halliday(Charles Mitchell Lab) who won the “2018 Outstanding Student Paper Award” from the Disease Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America. The award was for his 2017 paper, coauthored by James Umbanhowar and Charles Mitchell, and published in Ecology Lettersentitled “Interactions among symbionts operate across scales to influence parasite epidemics.”

The Zachary Nimchuk lab has been awarded a 3-year NSF funded grant as part of the ERA-CAPs program that promotes European-US research collaborations. The Nimchuk lab will join 4 European labs to study the molecular mechanisms of receptor signaling in plant development and disease resistance.

Jill Dowen and Bill Marzluff have secured a supplement from NIGMSto purchase an instrument for single cell isolation and recovery. This instrument will allow for more rapid and efficient genome editing of mammalian cells than current methods, and can also be utilized for single cell genomics. The instrument combines immunofluorescence imaging, robotic plating, and a special array that holds single cells. The technology was developed at UNC in the lab of Dr. Nancy Allbritton.

Congratulations to Nicole Arruda, a GMB graduate student in the Jill Dowen Lab, who was awarded a prestigious and highly-competitive three-year fellowship from the National Science Foundation.  Nicole’s project is entitled “Cis-Regulatory Elements Connect Gene Expression and Genome Organization.”

Congratulations to Dr. Daniel McKay, Assistant Professor of Biology and Genetics and Integrative Program for Biological and Genome Studies (iBGS), who was Awarded an Early Stage Investigator MIRA Award (R35). This 5-year Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA)from the NIH was given for his project titled “Genetic and Epigenetic Mechanisms of Developmental Gene Regulation”. McKay’s proposed studies will investigate how the transcriptional programs underlying tissue identity are deployed in the proper temporal sequence during development.

From more than 12,000 applicants, Matthew Niederhuber (a GMB graduate student in Daniel McKay’s lab), was selected to receive a prestigious “3-year NSF Predoctoral Fellowship award”. Matt’s project will focus on how transcription factors switch enhancers on and off during development.

A paper by Dr. Meral Tunc-Ozdemir (Alan Jones lab) and colleagues was selected by editors of the Journal of Biological Chemistry as an exciting advance in GPCR-related research over the last three years. The article, “Direct modulation of heterotrimeric G protein-coupled signaling by a receptor kinase complex,” appears in a special virtual issue entitled “Signaling through Space and Time.”

Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Coble, who was awarded the 2017-2018 Biology Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in the teaching of biology. This award was presented by Tri-Beta at the Biology Graduation Ceremony on May 12. Dr. Coble is a Biology Teaching Associate Professor and the Coordinator for the UNC BEST program.

Congratulations to Greg Matera, who was recently elected to serve on The RNA Society Board of Directors, beginning in 2019. The RNA Society is a non-profit, international scientific organization whose members are dedicated to fostering research and education in the field of RNA biology.