Black soldier fly larvae devour food waste and other organic matter and are made of 60% protein, making them an attractive sustainable food source in agriculture. But increasingly, black soldier larvae are dying before they reach livestock facilities as animal feed. 

Georgia Tech researchers, recognizing the culprit is the collective heat generated when the maggots eat in crowded conditions, have found that delivering the right amount of airflow could help solve the overheating issue. Their findings were published this month in Frontiers in Physics as part of a special issue on the “Physics of Social Interactions.”

“Black soldier fly larvae are widely used in an emerging food-recycling industry. The idea is to feed the larvae with food waste and then turn them into chicken feed,” explained first author Hungtang Ko, a Ph.D. student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.  “These larvae make a great candidate for this process because they eat just about everything.”

Each year humans waste more than one billion tons of food, or a third of all food production, and many countries are running out of options for disposing of this waste.

The larvae thrive in and around compost piles, where their larvae help break down organic material, from rotten produce to animal remains and manure. Black soldier fly larvae commonly grow to about 1,000 times their size, noted David Hu, professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering.

“It’s like going from the size of a person to the size of a big truck,” he said of the larvae’s growth from eggs to adults.

Hu has appeared on Science Friday graphically showing the voracious appetite of black soldier fly larvae, which can eat twice their body mass in food per day. But when these maggots feed while tightly packed in container bins, they generate metabolic heat that collectively can turn lethal for them.

Air Flow Matters

Ko and Hu collaborated with Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, to set up the experiments. Goldman uses fluidized beds —widely used in industrial applications like oil refining ― to control properties of granular media in animal and robot locomotion studies. Fluidized beds operate by forcing a vertical flow of fluid through a collection of particulate matter; above a certain flow rate, the grains transition from a solid pile to a fluid-like arrangement, where they collide and jostle.  

The researchers placed the larvae in a container subjected to regular air flow at a consistent temperature. They then attached a leaf blower to supply air flow into the chamber, manually ramping up and down the air speed in five-minute trials.

Because of the larvae’s constant activity, the collectives’ behavior under air fluidization differs from what is observed in traditional fluidized beds: larvae were un-jammable when air flow became low. Instead, they behave like a fluid that adapted and adjusted to external forces.

“An interesting aspect of this work is that it probes a regime of ‘active matter,’ which has received less attention from physicists: Instead of 3D swarms composed of widely separated, non-colliding flying birds and insects, our `swarm’ exists in another regime, where animals are packed tightly together,” Goldman said.

In a second experiment, the team used x-ray imaging and constant air speed to see how fast larvae eat. Specifically, Ko measured the average velocity and pressure of the larvae, as well as how much food they ate under various airflow speeds.

“As you continue to increase the flow, you’ll reach a point where all the larvae are flying [through the air]. The airflow is too fast, and they won’t eat well,” he said.   

Optimal air velocity will ensure the larvae are cooled off properly and can still feed effectively. “Probing optimal flow velocity will be a good next step. Also, from an engineering perspective, we need to consider other ways that we can cool the larvae down, including using heat transfer,” he added. 

The results indicated that as larvae are agitated by rapid flows, the insects are more likely to be suspended in mid-air without contacting the food, suggesting that a moderate flow rate would be optimal for feeding dense groups of larvae.

The researchers also hope this work will enable black soldier fly larvae to be more readily available as recyclers of food waste, which totals 1.3 billion tons per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. But just as important is the potential of these protein-rich insects to reduce the carbon effects of feeding animals. Global food production contributes more than 17 billion metric tons of human-made greenhouse gas emissions every year, according to a study published in September in Nature Food. Animal-based foods produce more than twice the emissions of plant-based food, the study found. 

“There's no sustainable protein source for the animals that we eat,” noted Ko. “The black soldier fly larvae could play a role in reducing the environmental impact of feeding these animals.”

CITATION: H. Ko, et. all, “Air-Fluidized Aggregates of Black Soldier Fly Larvae,” (Frontiers in Physics, 2021) https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2021.734447

Cancer chemotherapy has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years with traditional treatments like broad-spectrum cytotoxic agents being complemented or replaced by drugs that target specific genes believed to drive the onset and progression of the disease.

This more personalized approach to chemotherapy became possible when genomic profiling of individual patient tumors led researchers to identify specific "cancer driver genes" that, when mutated or abnormally expressed, led to the onset and development of cancer.

Different types of cancer — like lung cancer versus breast cancer — and, to some extent, different patients diagnosed with the same cancer type — show variations in the cancer driver genes believed to be responsible for disease onset and progression. “For example, the therapeutic drug Herceptin is commonly used to treat breast cancer patients when its target gene, HER-2, is found to be over-expressed,” says John F. McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.

McDonald explains that, currently, the identification of potential targets for gene therapy relies almost exclusively on genomic analyses of tumors that identify cancer driver genes that are significantly over-expressed.

But in their latest study, McDonald and Bioinformatics Ph.D. student Zainab Arshad have found that another important class of genetic changes may be happening in places where scientists don’t normally look: the network of gene-gene interactions associated with cancer onset and progression.

“Genes and the proteins they encode do not operate in isolation from one another,” McDonald says. “Rather, they communicate with one another in a highly integrated network of interactions.”

“What I think is most remarkable about our findings is that the vast majority of changes — more than 90% — in the network of interactions accompanying cancer are not associated with genes displaying changes in their expression,” adds Arshad, co-author of the paper. “What this means is that genes playing a central role in bringing about changes in network structure associated with cancer — the ‘hub genes’ — may be important new targets for gene therapy that can go undetected by gene expression analyses.”

Their research paper “Changes in gene-gene interactions associated with cancer onset and progression are largely independent of changes in gene expression” is published in the journal iScience.

Mutations, expression — and changes in network structure

In the study, Arshad and McDonald worked with samples of brain, thyroid, breast, lung adenocarcinoma, lung squamous cell carcinoma, skin, kidney, ovarian, and acute myeloid leukemia cancers — and they noticed differences in cell network structure for each of these cancers as they progressed from early to later stages.

When early-stage cancers develop, and stayed confined to their body tissue of origin, they noted a reduction in network complexity relative to normal pre-cursor cells. Normal, healthy cells are highly differentiated, but as they transition to cancer, “[T]hey go through a process of de-differentiation to a more primitive or stem cell-like state. It’s known from developmental biology that as cells transition from early embryonic stem cells to highly specialized fully differentiated cells, network complexity increases. What we see in the transition from normal to early-stage cancers is a reversal of this process,” McDonald explains.

McDonald says as the cancers progress to advanced stages, when they can spread or metastasize to other parts of the body, “[W]e observe re-establishment of high levels of network complexity, but the genes comprising the complex networks associated with advanced cancers are quite different from those comprising the complex networks associated with the precursor normal tissues.”

“As cancers evolve in function, they are typically associated with changes in DNA structure, and/or with changes in the RNA expression of cancer driver genes. Our results indicate that there’s an important third class of changes going on — changes in gene interactions — and many of these changes are not detectable if all you’re looking for are changes in gene expression.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.103522

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the Mark Light Integrated Cancer Research Center Student Fellowship , the Deborah Nash Endowment Fund , and the Ovarian Cancer Institute (Atlanta), where John F. McDonald serves as chief research officer. The results shown here are based upon data generated by the TCGA Research Network: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/.

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology has received a $2 million federal grant to create tools that will provide the clearest three-dimensional images yet of the chemical and biomolecular interactions between plants and the soil in which they grow.

At just a few inches underground, the rhizosphere — the thin strip of earth that includes the soil-root interface — has so far been difficult to visualize on site. If scientists can build instruments that capture in real-time clearer images of the physical associations of microbes attached to roots, along with the oxygen-carbon-nitrogen chemical exchanges they mediate, it could help mitigate the effects of climate change and lead to the development of more sustainable fuels and fertilizers.

“From a microbiological perspective, we have catalogued what microbes are in the root zone and how abundant they are,” said Joel Kostka, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “But there's been very little work to understand their dynamics under real soil conditions.”

Kostka, who also serves as associate chair for Research in Biological Sciences, joins Marcus Cicerone, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and principal investigator for the new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research. The research team also includes Francisco Robles, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Lily Cheung, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the College of Engineering.

Together, the researchers plan to produce a new optical instrument that will provide 3D images of dynamic metabolic processes with chemical specificity — meaning it will be able to identify carbon sources (sugars, organic acids) exuded by plant roots and nitrogen-rich compounds provided to the root by nitrogen-fixing (diazotrophic) microbes. The instrument will be built with commercially available components, and with an eye towards simplicity so that it can be easily leveraged by Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers and field sites.

A ‘hotspot for microbes’ in 3D

Understanding more about the metabolic processes happening in the rhizosphere will help the DOE develop a wider range of sustainable products like new types of biofertilizers and biofuels. The research will also help create practices for better crop management — and will help researchers use plants and soil as more effective carbon traps that sequester greenhouse gases from the atmosphere into the soil.

“The problem is that we don’t know much about the free-living bacteria in the soil, because we can’t get in there and look,” Cicerone said. “The DOE wanted somebody to build an instrument that would allow them to image or gather information about the metabolic processes, the interaction — the metabolic interactions between the microbes and the plants, in real time.”

Kostka adds that the rhizosphere is “a hotspot for microbes.”

“It’s often where the plant is communicating with the outside world,” he explained. “Our goal is to develop an instrument that they (the DOE) can use to better understand those interactions between plants and microbes and how those can be tweaked, say, to optimize plant production, crop production, biofuels and biomass production. And that's the long-term goal for us.”

How light gets scattered, smothered, and covered in soil

Cicerone says the visibility issue with soil involves how photons — or particles of light — scatter once they hit the soil. He likens it to someone putting a red light up to the back of their thumb.

“You turn your thumb around, your thumb glows red, right? So, the light comes through, but most of it scatters. The unscattered light contains the spatial information, but it is so weak that you can’t detect it by eye, and you lose the spatial information. The same thing happens with the soils. You get a lot of light scattering, and you lose spatial information,” Cicerone said.

Cicerone and Robles will build instrumentation that will focus light into the soil and that is “exquisitely sensitive to the minuscule amount of light that only scatters when it reaches its target.” Evaluating that light will help scientists learn even more about the chemical processes in the rhizosphere.

The visibility enhancements will be implemented in optical techniques with names like coherent Raman scattering and optical coherence tomography, which are commonly used for non-invasive imaging of thin biological material, like the retina of the eye — or the tiniest of plant roots.

“We learn two things from the light coming out of the sample. The amount of light coming out tells you about the refractive index of the material, and the light’s frequency change tells you about the chemical composition of the material,” Cicerone explained.

It’s through imaging and then optimizing those microbe-plant interactions that the DOE aims to design more sustainable products and practices, based on the chemistry to be learned from the team’s new optical instruments.

“This is a three-year funded project, and we hope at the end of the three years to have an experimental system, where we can do something that nobody else can do,” Cicerone added. “And that is that we can follow the biochemistry under the soil, in situ, in real time, to clearly see what's going on there and find out what the microbes really are doing in natural conditions. At that point, we can start manipulating the biology, start doing the experiments that the DOE is primarily interested in.”

Award Number: DE-SC0022121
Title: Deep Chemical Imaging of the Rhizosphere
Institution: Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta, GA
Principal Investigator: Cicerone, Marcus

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

By Frida Carrera

As one of the nation’s leading research institutions, Georgia Tech has always emphasized the pursuit of progress and service in its research endeavors. With such a strong focus on research, it is only right that many students at Tech have seized their opportunities to make an impact on the real world and solve complex problems. Taking initiative, asking the right questions, and being passionate about making a positive impact are innate characteristics that make a researcher, and Georgia Tech has in no way come short of giving rise to many exemplary researchers. The following undergraduate student researchers are serving as catalysts for innovation and development in their respective fields and are representative of Georgia Tech’s mission in developing leadership and improving the human condition. 

Prahathishree (Premi) Mohanavelu is a 5^th-year Computer Science major with a Pre-Health concentration. She conducts research with Dr. Cassie Mitchell in Biomedical Engineering on informatics-based literature mapping to personalize therapy for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. 

“I was really looking for a way to apply the concepts I was learning in my computer science classes to the field of healthcare, and I felt this position was the perfect fit for that.” 

One of her main reasons for conducting this research was her interest in medical innovation. Premi believes the future of medicine will rely on preventative care and says her research position has also helped her with oral presentation and communication skills. Premi also serves as president of the Undergraduate Research Ambassadors and utilizes her research role and experience to teach prospective research students the ins and outs of obtaining research knowledge.

Yiyang (Diana) Wang is a 4^th-year Computer Science major conducting research with Dr. Jennifer Kim on contact tracing visualization tool design and implementation. Her research is applicable to easily contracted illnesses including COVID-19. Yiyang believes her research will help people understand the importance of contact tracing and how data collection, for contact tracing purposes, could be beneficial. Yiyang’s goal is to become a software engineer and wants to focus on improving technology for the benefit of the user. Yiyang thanks the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) for obtaining her position as it was a major resource for her in finding and landing her current research position. 

Milan Riddick is currently a 5^th-year Biomedical Engineering major with a minor in Health, Medicine, and Society conducting research with Dr. Jennifer Singh in the area of History, Technology, and Society on the mistrust of the COVID-19 vaccine among black citizens of Georgia. Milan has been the primary lead in her own research and has combined her passions for medical sociology and research to do what she loves. From proposing, securing funding, recruiting, and interviewing, Milan had a vision from the start and hopes to understand and improve the trust disparity between black Georgia citizens and the COVID-19 vaccine. Milan hopes her current research will aid with the trust between people and medicine as well as securing her path to graduate school.

William York is a 4^th-year Biomedical Engineering major with a concentration in Pre-Health. He is currently conducting research with Dr. Edward Botchwey on using biomaterials to immunomodulate muscular defects for tissue regeneration. He believes his research is important because it will aid in the initiative in potentially replacing stem cells with exosomes in stem cell research while retaining the same regenerative effects and creating fewer risks. William wasn’t sure about research when he first arrived at Tech, but after learning the opportunities and resources UROP had for undergraduate students, he quickly became involved. William is now currently in the Research Option program and is also an Undergraduate Research Ambassador providing guidance to students also interested in research. 

Hannah Shin is a 3^rd-year Biology major with a concentration in Physiology and is conducting research with Dr. Colin Harrison on measuring the organization of biological knowledge around experimental design utilizing a card sorting task. Hannah’s research uses its results to identify the weak areas in biology programs and make the necessary revisions to instruct students more effectively. Hannah believes her research will also aid her in future endeavors. 

 “My career goal is medical school and I believe my research will advance both my academic and career goals because it exposes me to real-world applications of data analysis and allows me to dive into the differences in knowledge organization among people of different backgrounds.” 

 Hannah is also a participant in the Research Option program and is the executive vice president of the Undergraduate Research Ambassadors. She uses her research and personal experience to help students gain confidence in pursuing research they are passionate about. 

Read more about Undergraduate Research opportunities by going to http://urop.gatech.edu. 

Atlanta is often called the “city in a forest” because of its lush canopy of trees, uncommon for a major city. In the heart of that forest sits Georgia Tech’s 400-acre campus. And within campus lies a variety of wildlife that has made Georgia Tech its home.

“I don’t think most people are aware of wildlife on campus,” said Emily Weigel, senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences. “They might see a feral cat here or there, but they don’t really think about all the other animals that live on campus. Georgia Tech is the animals’ home base, and they probably don’t know anything other than they were born in this area. They don’t know they’re in the middle of a city.”

Included in the biodiversity surveys of the area are squirrels, possums, raccoons, rats, and birds. Several months ago a couple of coyotes were spotted, but they were just passing through campus. At least two foxes live in the glade, a densely forested area behind the president’s residence on the north side of campus.

Ben Seleb, a Ph.D. student in quantitative biosciences, is developing an open source camera for studying the foxes and other wildlife. He and his colleagues at Tech4Wildife, a course and campus organization devoted to the conservation of wildlife, have been monitoring the foxes.

“We had some suspicions that foxes were in the glade,” Seleb said. “It’s a very secluded area with dense vegetation, so it’s a great spot for campus wildlife to hide during the day and then come out at night.”

To confirm their suspicions, they set up cameras inside the glade and left them for a couple of weeks. When they reviewed the images, they had captured two foxes on camera at the same time.

“We know there could be more, but we’ve only seen two foxes at one time. They’re difficult to tell apart, but we’re working on identifying individuals,” he said. “There are a number of other animals on campus, and the glade is where many of them live. We have seen raccoons, possums, and a couple of feral cats that travel in and out of the glade.”

The glade connects to Tech’s new EcoCommons, a lush 8-acre woodland area near the center of campus, providing a pathway for wildlife to travel into campus at night, while still giving them the cover of vegetation. Georgia Tech generally offers a handful of classes related to wildlife or ecology, but the amount of wildlife on campus is creating new research opportunities.

“I’m happy to see programs giving students opportunities that they may not have been aware of,” Seleb said.

August 2024 Update: Please consult this page for the latest information about mental health & counseling resources, including Satellite Counselor Tara Holdampf's consultation hours for Fall 2024 - Spring 2025.

Tara Holdampf is the new College of Sciences satellite counselor, and will provide consultation services and support for students from an office at the Molecular Science and Engineering Building (MoSE). 

“I'm excited to join the incredibly welcoming and talented group at the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech as a satellite counselor,” Holdampf says, “to continue the process of breaking down barriers between students and mental health services.”

Satellite counselor locations improve accessibility for students by providing counseling in places where students spend most of their time. Placing a counselor in an academic department helps to destigmatize mental health and may serve those who might hesitate to go to the Georgia Tech Counseling Center. A primary goal is to reach students who might not have otherwise sought out services. 

Holdampf will provide a wide variety of services such as individual counseling, group counseling, psycho-educational workshops, and walk-in hours for brief consultations (available to students, or faculty/staff who need to consult about a student). 

Holdampf issues a reminder that “as stress levels increase, and the fall semester continues, please know that GT CARE and GTCC are here to offer confidential support and services to students in need of mental healthcare.”

Currently enrolled interested students can reach out to GT CARE at (404) 894-3498 to schedule an initial assessment, and to be connected to health and wellness services. Current clients can continue to reach their GTCC counselor via email.

Holdampf will be offering consultation hours during which students, faculty, and staff can meet to learn more about mental health resources on campus, and/or to discuss a specific non-emergency student concern. These consults typically last 15 minutes. Those interested can email Holdampf at tara.holdampf@studentlife.gatech.edu to request a meeting. Holdampf will respond with a date/time and link/location for the consultation.

Find Tara's consultation hours and more resources here.

Students in need of mental health support after hours can call the GTCC main number at 404-894-2575, and follow the prompts to speak with an after-hours counselor.  Please visit the GTCC website for upcoming workshops, Let’s Talk sessions, and online offerings.

Holdampf, who has practiced in a higher education setting for seven years, has an M.S. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Georgia. Holdampf is also a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional and serves on the council of the Georgia College Counseling Association.