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The Atlantic's Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer Ed Yong writes about the unique snowflake yeast experiment conducted by Georgia Tech researchers that shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors. The study, published recently in Nature, provided new insight into how "that change from micro to macro, from one cell to many, was one of the most pivotal evolutionary journeys in Earth’s history." William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences program led the research team. Other researchers include Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, School of Biological Sciences; Seyed Alireza Zamani Dahaj, computational biologist, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and the School of Physics; Thomas C. Day, Ph.D. candidate, School of Physics, and Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics. Anthony J. Burnetti, research scientist; Penelope Kahn, research technician; Dung T. Lac, research technician; Kai Tong, postdoctoral scholar; and Peter Conlin, postdoctoral scholar, are all from the School of Biological Sciences. ((Atlantic subscription required; read more about the research here.)
The Atlantic | 2023-05-12T00:00:00-04:00
Precisely how multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled ancestors remains poorly understood. The transition happened hundreds of millions of years ago, and early multicellular species are largely lost to extinction. To investigate how multicellular life evolves from scratch, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology decided to take evolution into their own hands. Led by William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, a team of researchers has initiated the first long-term evolution experiment aimed at evolving new kinds of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors in the lab. In this case, the cells are snowflake yeast, and they grew so large they could be seen with the naked eye. Other researchers include Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, School of Biological Sciences; Seyed Alireza Zamani Dahaj, computational biologist, Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, and the School of Physics; Thomas C. Day, Ph.D. candidate, School of Physics, and Peter Yunker, associate professor, School of Physics. Anthony J. Burnetti, research scientist; Penelope Kahn, research technician; Dung T. Lac, research technician; Kai Tong, postdoctoral scholar; and Peter Conlin, postdoctoral scholar, are all from the School of Biological Sciences. (This story was also covered at ScienceAlert, NPR, Interesting Engineering, New Atlas, Newswise, and Tech Explorist. Read more about the research here.)
The New York Times | 2023-05-10T00:00:00-04:00
Model systems are a cornerstone of microbiology. However, despite microbiology’s heavy reliance on laboratory models, these systems are typically not analyzed systematically to improve their relevance. This limitation is a primary challenge to understand microbes’ physiology in natural environments. This study, which includes members of Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection (CMDI), provides a proof of concept for generalizable approaches for model improvement using transcriptomic data of the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa from sputum of patients with cystic fibrosis. The study's researchers include Marvin Whiteley, professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech Bennie H. and Nelson D. Abell Chair in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and Co-Director, Emory-Children’s Cystic Fibrosis Center; Other School of Biological Sciences and CMDI researchers include Gina R. Lewin, postdoctoral scholar, and research scientists Daniel Cornforth and Francis Diggle.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2023-05-01T00:00:00-04:00
Karla Haack, who received her Ph.D. in 2009 in molecular biology from the School of Biological Sciences, and is a member of the College of Sciences Advisory Board, is one of five new 2023-2024 member leaders of the American Physiological Society (APS). Haack, a medical writer for Merck, was elected as a councilor during the recent APS Summit in Long Beach, California. Prior to joining Merck in 2021, Haack taught anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology courses at Kennesaw State University (KSU) in Georgia. Haack completed her postdoctoral research at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Newswise | 2023-04-23T00:00:00-04:00
Yeast are carb lovers, sustaining themselves by fermenting sugars and starches from sources such as dough, grapes, and grains, with bread, wine, and beer as happy byproducts. Now, researchers have made one type of yeast a little less dependent on carbs by enabling it to use light as energy. The work, reported last week on the preprint server bioRxiv, is “the first step in more complex modes of engineering artificial photosynthesis,” says Magdalena Rose Osburn, a geobiologist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the research. The study's four co-authors are all with the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Tech's Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection: Ph.D. student Autumn Peterson, senior scientist and grant writer Carina Baskett; Will Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences; and research scientist Anthony Burnetti.
Science | 2023-04-18T00:00:00-04:00
Life depends on molecular machines made of proteins that interact with each other to form functional complexes. Researchers need accurate descriptions of protein-protein interactions to understand molecular biosystems, but obtaining such descriptions is very challenging, especially for theoretical approaches. Generalizing AlphaFold 2, a powerful deep learning algorithm for predicting protein structures from sequence, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory proposed a computational approach, AF2Complex, to not only predict the atomic structural models of interacting proteins, but also to predict whether multiple proteins interact, even if they experience transient interactions that are difficult to capture experimentally. The Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences researchers are Mu Gao, senior research scientist, and Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents' Professor; Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair & GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology. (Their study is funded in part by the U.S. Dept. of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.)
U.S. Department of Energy | 2023-04-17T00:00:00-04:00
Fermented foods like kimchi have been an integral part of Korean cuisine for thousands of years. Today, most kimchi is made through mass fermentation in glass, steel, or plastic containers, but it’s long been claimed that the highest quality kimchi is fermented in traditional handmade clay jars called onggi. David Hu, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the Georgia W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, used fluid dynamics to prove how onggi make kimchi taste so good. The results were published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. (This story was also covered in list23, SFGate, The Washington Post, Scientific American, Gulf News, Yahoo!News, Ars Technica and Technology Networks.)
Cosmos Magazine | 2023-04-17T00:00:00-04:00
Peat, the ingredient that makes bagged soil light and spongy, comes from wetlands. It can increase the amount of water soil holds onto while also, paradoxically, increasing its drainage ability — creating an ideal environment for nurturing plants. But while it does all of those things, extracting it is problematic because it strips the bogs it comes from of their carbon stores, and hinders their ability to keep storing carbon — both important parts of fighting climate change. Caitlin Petro, a research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences who studies peatlands and the plants in them, explains that it can take millennia for just a few feet of peat to form.
Washington Post | 2023-04-05T00:00:00-04:00
Georgia Tech researchers show that rising temperatures in northern regions may damage peatlands, critical ecosystems for storing carbon from the atmosphere — and could decouple vital processes in microbial support systems. Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological Sciences, and Caitlin Petro, research scientist who works with Kostka, recently led a collaborative study to investigate how this critical type of ecosystem (and the "missing link" of microbial processes that support it) may react to the increased temperature and carbon dioxide levels predicted to come with climate change.
Science Daily | 2023-04-03T00:00:00-04:00
Toad tongues are ready for their closeup — extremely close closeups — in this video from San Francisco PBS station KQED. The closeups and slow-motion photography are necessary to show the role toad saliva plays in snatching crickets, worms, and other prey in the blink of an eye. Thanks to research from the team of David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics, science learned that a toad’s saliva starts off thick and sticky. But when the saliva hits prey at a high speed, it thins out dramatically, pouring into every nook and cranny the tongue touches. And then, it becomes sticky again, drawing that meal down the hatch.
KQED | 2023-03-28T00:00:00-04:00
