BioSciNEWS Online
Volume 2, Number 2, February 2001 
Biograds: A Review of the Year 2000 and the New Regime
 Brian Hoffpauir, soon to be past president, writes that March 1, 2001 will mark the beginning of a new fiscal year and the inauguration of a new executive council for BioGrads.  Over the last year, BioGrads has been as active as ever, and record setting profits for 2000 have produced financial stability for the organization.  The group raises its funds primarily by selling course notes donated by the faculty members to students.

BioGrads has been sucessful in fulfilling its primary goal of assisting graduate students with travel and research awards.  During the 1999-2000 academic year, BioGrads assisted graduate students in their research endeavors and travel needs by providing over $6250 to eligible members.  Furthermore, with an increase in profits and a growing number of active members, they project that more than $11,000 will be awarded during the 2001 fiscal year.  Other activities of BioGrads benefit the entire department.
Biograds accomplishments for 2000-2001: Hoffpauir writes that none of the activities would be possible without the faculty and graduate students of the Department of Biological Sciences.  The outgoing executive council thanks all faculty members who participate in each semester’s note-selling program and the dedicated members who sell notes for biology courses.  The year 2000 was a great success, and a firm foundation has been established for the future.
The new regime:
President:  Steve Pollock 
Vice President:  Mathew Brown 
Treasurer:  Ginger Brininstool 
Secretary:  Andrea Huval 
Fund-Raisers:  Brenda Grau and Matt Ducote 
BioGrads Representative at faculty meetings:  Mike Taylor 
Nominations of Graduate Students Due 23 February
Bill Stickle, Chair of the Graduate Student Award Subcommittee for the department, reports that the time is here for student award nominations. The departmental awards committee is charged with the task of awarding the following graduate student awards to outstanding students in our department. Nominations of worthy students can be made by sending a nomination letter to the committee by 23 February in care of Prissy Milligan.  The following awards for teaching and research are announced:
  • C. W. Edgerton Honor Award - Given annually to a plant biology graduate student for significant achievements in research.
  • T. Vinton Holmes Award - Given annually to support student research in the field of ornithology.
  • William H. Gates Award for Excellence in Freshman Instruction - Given annually to a teaching assistant in the zoology degree program for outstanding instruction in freshman laboratories.
  • Daisy B. and William J. Luke Botany Teaching Assistant Award - Given annually to a teaching assistant in the plant biology program for outstanding instruction.
  • Freshman Biology Award - Given annually to a teaching assistant in the biological sciences for outstanding instruction in freshman biology laboratories.
  • Simon Chang / Ezzat Younathan Outstanding Biochemistry Teaching Assistant Award - Given annually to a teaching assistant in the biochemistry program for outstanding instruction.
The summaries above were extracted from the departmental graduate bulletin.  More information about each award, including award criteria, is available from Prissy Milligan or Charyl Thompson. 
Bernard Lowy Award for the Study of Tropical Botany in Latin America
Applications soon will be invited for a $1000 award to help offset the cost of research. The support is from the Bernard Lowy Fund intended for the study of tropical botany in Latin America. The family and friends of the late Bernard Lowy, tropical mycologist and professor at Louisiana State University from 1957 until his death in 1992, established the Lowy Fund in recognition of his research efforts and interest in conservation of tropical ecosystems. Dr. Lowy, a long time faculty member and professor emeritus in the Department of Botany founded the Mycological Herbarium at LSU.  The Fund was created in recognition of Dr. Lowy's research and his concern for conservation of tropical environments of Latin American.  The specific objective of the Fund is to provide much-needed supplemental support for research travel for graduate students and postdoctoral investigators interested in the study of tropical botany in Latin America.  Lowy Fellows are chosen based on a short proposal outlining the work to be preformed and the expenditures. Proposals must be accompanied by a letter of support written by the candidate's major professor or LSU faculty sponsor and must be approved by the Chair of Department of Biological Sciences and the faculty in the area of botany.

Annually the Lowy Fund will provide funding of up to $1000 for travel and related expenses for research in diverse aspects of tropical botany in Latin America. The award is open to postdoctoral investigators and students in plant biology at LSU or at a university or research organization in Latin America.  In addition any previous PhDs in plant biology at LSU are eligible.  Support is for travel and living expenses related to research conducted at LSU or at another U.S. institution, while resident at LSU.  Off-campus researchers should establish contact with an LSU faculty member who will act as his or her sponsor during the visit.

Winter Cleanup in Microkew
If you've passed by the department's MicroKew garden lately, you may have noticed that it is looking rather sparse.  The new look is the result of a Winter Cleaning Party held on Saturday morning, 9 December, with volunteers Roland Roberts, Marie Standifer, Vesna Karaman, and Lowell Urbatsch participating.  Old growth was removed, weeds were purged, and shrubs received a general pruning.  All this was to make way for new green things that will appear in the spring.  As you walk by during the next few months, check on the progress of the diverse species present. Recent activity in the area also has included planting of native plants, including lots of asters, the favored research subjects of Urbatsch and some of his students.  In addition small native trees including Robinia (black locust), Calicarpa (beauty berry), Sassafras (the source of filé), and Persea (red bay, a local source of bay leaf), have been planted outside Williams Hall by Urbatsch.

Because MicroKew was established before the departmental merger, it could be that you do not know its history. So why MicroKew? Then chair, Russell Chapman, became annoyed with the barren surroundings of the Life Sciences Building.  He contacted the grounds people to come up with a beautification plan for the area between LSB, Choppin Hall, and Williams Hall.  The plan required a fund-raising effort that involved Chapman, Beth Michel, and several other department menbers.  Because of the close associations and repeated visits of the then director, E. A. Bell, of the Royal Botanic Gardens located at Kew, Richmond, Surrey, just outside of London, we began to call the garden area "MicroKew." The name stuck.  Bell was helpful in the effort to raise the funds for the garden, including for the irrigation system. A visit from Iain Prance, who followed Bell as Kew Director, took place in conjunction with a Schexnayder lecture before the garden was completed. The current director, Peter Crane, was a visitor long before he aspired to the position, and he helps to continue the LSU-Kew tradition.

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NSF Research Coordination Networks Program was new for 2001, and two LSU biologists, Russell Chapman and Meredith Blackwell, were involved in different successful proposals, Beyond "Deep Green": Toward an Integration of Plant Phylogenetics and Plant Genomics and the A Phylogeny for Kingdom Fungi ("Deep Hypha") listed above. It is not known if the program will be continued next year, but it is one for which community involvement is needed.  This year’s awards will amount to just under $500,000 over a five year period. The synopsis of the program follows: The goal of this program is to encourage and foster communications and collaborations among scientists with common goals and interests. Groups of investigators will be supported to communicate and coordinate their research efforts across disciplinary, organizational, institutional and geographical boundaries. The proposed networking activities should have a theme as a focus of its collaboration. The focus could be on a broad research question, a specific group of organisms, or particular technologies or approaches. Innovative ideas for implementing novel networking strategies to promote research coordination and collaboration that enable new research directions or advancement of a field are especially encouraged.

The successful proposals were based on a prototype provided by the Green Plant Phylogeny Research Coordination Group, which advanced the progress of a phylogeny of green plants including green algae. Chapman was a CoPI and his former postdoc, Mark Buchheim, was PI on that grant. Their success is evident in their web site. The new green plant funding, Beyond "Deep Green" has as its PI Brent D. Mishler, Berkeley, CoPI with Chapman and Buchheim on the prototype grant. Mishler will develop integrated research activities between plant phylogeneticists and genomicists  over the next 5 years. These two areas of research have so far proceeded entirely separately, but are poised for a synthesis. The green plants represent one of the biggest branches of the tree of life -- more than 1/2 million species -- a clade at least 1 billion years old.

Mycologists embraced molecular phylogenetics early, and some of the techniques pioneered for use with fungi have proved equally useful in other organisms, including plants, such as the nuclear ribosomal Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) regions.  During the last decade great progress has been made toward constructing a single phylogenetic classification of fungi, but the current data sets rely upon DNA sequences from only 800 or so fungal taxa, out of an estimated 80,000 described species of fungi, or only about 1% representation. Furthermore, some mycologists have argued that there may be over a million species of fungi still to describe, especially from tropical and other regions of the world poorly surveyed for microbial and fungal diversity. This network  award will facilitate expanded interactions among current workers in the field and help to attract new researchers to the effort, to construct a phylogeny of the Kingdom Fungi, in turn to facilitate the discovery, identification, and incorporation into a taxonomic framework of novel fungal taxa across all four major phyla of fungi. Phylogenetic research on fungi will benefit numerous fields like biomedical and pharmaceutical research, animal and plant pathology, food science, bioprospecting, and environmental analysis and monitoring.

Another award for a Wolbachia Research Coordination Network went to Yale University. Wolbachia are inherited bacterial parasites that infect a large number of invertebrates. There has been an upsurge in research interest in these organisms in recent years because of their newly appreciated wide host range together with the array of newly discovered effects they have on the hosts they infect. These include inducing developmental defects such as cytoplasmic incompatibility in young embryos, overriding chromosomal sex-determination, inducing parthenogenesis and even selectively killing male hosts.
Awards
Two graduate students in the Department of Biological Sciences won Sigma Xi grants-in-aid of research in the most recent national competition.  Congratulations to them.
  • Daniel Ortiz  (Systematics/Evo Bio)  Funded at $750, "On the appearance of speciation by reinforcement." Daniel is a student of Mohamed Noor.
  • Christopher Witt (Systematics/Evo Bio) Funded at $906, "Do genes lie? Resolving a contradiction between phylogeny and biology." is a student of Van Remsen.

Professor from Coimbra, Portugal visits Rainey Lab
Dr Milton da Costa visited the Rainey Lab for a week (28th Jan - 2nd Feb). Milton is a full professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Universidade de Coimbra central Portugal, founded in 1290 by H.M. King D. Dinis. Predating LSU by some 550 years the Universidade de Coimbra has many age-old traditions including "Queima das Fitas" ? the "Burning of the Ribbons" that symbolizes the end of the academic year, the "fado" --a style of song that adapted itself to new social realities, and the "Republics" --student administrated residences.

Dr da Costa is internationally known for his work on thermophilic bacteria and especially members of the Thermus/Deinococcus phylum. Fred Rainey has collaborated with Milton da Costa for many years and together they have published 9 papers (see the most recent listed below). Students from the da Costa lab have visited LSU and Rainey has spent time there making use of the chemotaxonomy facilities and writing papers.

During his visit da Costa was a guest lecturer in BIOL 4125 (Prokaryotic Diversity) and he gave two excellent lectures on Extremophiles which the students really enjoyed. As well as teaching class and tasting some of the local cuisine Da Costa and Rainey wrote and submitted two papers to the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology. They have another three in preparation.
 
Write On Biologist
Patents
Laine, R.A. and J.Y.C. Lo. " Pan-Bacterial and Pan-Fungal Identification Reagents and Methods of Use Thereof"  US Patent # 6,184,027,  2001. Issued Feb. 2001.
12 February 1809 --The birthday of Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Miami University

Meeting Presentations
Southeastern Archaeology Conference North American Benthological Society American Society for Limnology & Oceanography Benthic Ecology Meeting PPAR: A Transcription Odyessy, Keystone, Colorado
The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) received the 2000 Henry Ford Award for Environmental Conservation, awarded by Conservation International - Brazil and sponsored by the Brazilian Division of the Ford Motor Company. The Henry Ford Award annually recognizes the most significant contributions for nature conservation in Brazil.  BDFFP, a joint venture of the Smithsonian and Brazil's Institute for Amazonian Research, is where Rita Mesquita and Bruce Williamson do research (see their recent publications listed above). 

The Forest Fragments Project was awarded the prize for a proposal entitled: "The BDFFP: 21 years of research and training in the Amazon." In awarding the prize, the jury noted that "During the last 20 years of existence the project has produced important scientific contributions for the Amazon, through publishing more than 300 scientific papers and 2 books. Furthermore, the Project has played an important role in training leaders in conservation for the Amazonian region--many of the project's former Master's and Ph.D. students are now leaders in local research institutes, NGOs, and governmental agencies. The courses and internship program offered by the Forest Fragments Project are unique, and are models for how to train young conservation professionals working in the Amazon and throughout Brazil".

New Face
Brian Beckage is a new postdoc in Bill Platt’s lab.  He received his Ph.D. from Duke, where he worked with Jim Clark on the ecology of seedling dynamics in Appalachaian Forests. This month he was awarded a prestigous National Park Service Fellowship for three years that pays salary  and field travel. Only three of these fellowships were awarded in the country this year. Beckage’s work will combine both modeling spatial and temporal dynamics using data from long term permanent plots and experimental studies aimed at elucidating interactive effects of fires and hurricanes on slash pine population dynamics in the Everglades pine savannas.
The change from the 388- prefix to 578 (LSU)- necessitated the change in old 334- telephone numbers. A new telephone list is being printed for department members and will be given out later in the week.
Name Old Number New Number
Kevin Carman (Lab) 334-1862  578-9108
Gregory Pettis (Lab) 334-2128 578-9110
Frederick Rainey (Office) 334-2127 578-9109
Steven Nguyen (Office) 334-3479 578-9112
Julia Enticknap (Office) 334-3489 578-9113
Michael Hellberg (Lab) 334-3496  578-9114
Evanna  Gleason (Lab) 334-3780  578-9115 
Jacqueline Stephens (Lab) 334-3792 578-9116
Educational Outreach
Marie Standifer was a guest presenter at Native American Day at the Marksville State Historical Site on November 15 and 16.  During the two-day event she gave an interactive program on, "Plant Foods of the Southeastern Indians," eleven times to over five hundred school children.
7 February 2001
Send news to Meredith Blackwell