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| Importance of Herbaria. Vicki
Funk (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution)
Angiosperm Phylogeny. Peter F. Stevens (Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis) Fungal diversity: from the herbarium to the environment . Rytas Vilgalys (Duke University) Botanical Exploration and Curation in the 21st Century or What’s all that stuff in those cases? Where did it come from? What good is it? Michael O. Dillon (Field Museum and University of Chicago) Systematics of the genus Cordyceps (Fungi, Ascomycota) and the evolution of host-jumping. Joseph W. Spatafora (Oregon State University) The role of university herbaria in biodiversity research and conservation. Tom Wendt (Plant Resources Center, University of Texas, Austin) |
| 4:15-5:00 --OPEN HOUSE IN THE HERBARIUM |
| SATURDAY 27 APRIL. ALL DAYFIELD TRIP |
| BioGrads is hosting the spring crawfish boil on April 12 (FRIDAY) at 5 PM outside of Foster Hall. The cost to attend is as follows: $5 per person and $10 per family. Faculty members who allowed BioGrads to sell their notes may attend at no cost. Please pay in advance by placing your payment in an envelope in Ginger Brininstool's mailbox in room 107 LSB. Be sure to print your name and the number of people you are paying for on the envelope. |
| Undergraduate Awards
for 2002
Charles S. McCleskey Memorial Endowed Scholarship Outstanding Senior in Biochemistry Jennifer Eileen McCain was given a third Charles S. McCleskey Memorial Endowed Scholarship. She has done undergraduate honors research in the laboratory of Pat DiMario for the past 2.5 years. Her honor's thesis titled "Preparations for transformation of Drosophila melanogaster with green fluorescent protein-tagged DMNOPP140 and DMNOPP140-RGG by P-element transformation" was successfully defended in July, 2001. Jennifer is a major in chemistry, biochemistry and microbiology. She plans to attend law school in the fall.Amborski Award Erin Marie Weeden graduated this past December as one of our University Medalists. She has been accepted to the 2002 class at the LSU School of Medicine in New Orleans. Weeden was supported for two years in the laboratory of Eric Achberger through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research involved a novel endonuclease activity associated with a peptide fragment of the McrB protein from E. coli. At the time of her graduation, she was using site-directed mutagenesis to create specific changes in the coding region of this gene. For two years, Weeden served as an instructor in the LSU Microbiology and Molecular Biology Outreach Program Workshop.M. D. Socolofsky Scholarship Chris Nicole Davis worked in the laboratory of John Battista for two years. Over the past year she has been responsible for work on a non-spore forming bacterium that is distinguished by its extraordinary resistance to ionizing radiation. Davis is in the process of characterizing a mutant strain that is extremely sensitive to ionizing radiation, lacking the ability to repair the DNA double strand breaks formed following irradiation.Outstanding Senior in Zoology Sara K. Bordelon in Huangen Ding's laboratory for over two years. She is currently carrying out experiments independently on the dimerization of a heat shock protein that is involved in the iron-sulfur cluster assembly. Bordelon will be a co-author on a paper to be submitted soon. She has been accepted to the Ophthalmology School in Memphis for the fall semester.Biological Sciences Undergraduate Research Award Lisa Anne Bertucci has worked in Mohamed Noor's laboratory since the fall term of 1999, assisting the laboratory's study of the genetic basis of characters contributing to the speciation process. She is a co-author on two publications (Evolution and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA). In addition Bertucci's independent research project resulted in another publication on which she will be the first author. |
| Sites of interest to undergraduates |
| Department
members can help the department to function efficiently:
Procurement card purchases: (1) Please turn in receipts to the accounting section (preferably, to Teresa Wollmer) the same week that merchandise is purchased; do not keep the receipts until you receive a BF from Accounting Services via e-mail. Be sure to write the appropriate account number on these receipts. Direct charge purchases: (1) Submit your order form containing the assigned purchase order number to the accounting section. (2) Packing slips with date merchandise is received must also be turned in to the accounting section. (3) If you are ordering supplies that are $500 or less, call accounting section to obtain an in-house purchase order number. (4) Any items that are over $500 but not exceeding $2,000, a confirming purchase order number from the Office of Purchasing is a REQUIREMENT. You must also obtain a minimum of three quotes from at least three firms normally handling the items or services to be purchased. These should be submitted with your request in order to receive a confirming purchase order. |
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Congratulations to Steve Pomarico, who won the Center for Freshman Year Teaching Award. The award is sponsored by the Tiger Athletic Foundation and is awarded to faculty members who teach first- and second-year students. The award is worth $1000. |
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| News from the News |
| Paul Johnson,a PhD student
of
Ken Brown, completed his PhD in the mid nineties and went on
to a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Texas. Currently,
he is a research biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium,
and his work was featured on page 1 of the Birmingham (Alabama) News (18 March 2002). Snails' survival on slippery slope by JERRY BAKER, News staff writer. East of U.S. 78 near Sayre, the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River makes a hard left and speeds over a shoal as its flows southwest. Two feet below the surface, beneath large flat rocks, a small snail makes its home. The plicate rocksnail is near the bottom of the river's food chain. It eats algae and organic matter and, in turn, is eaten by turtles and fish. But it carries more than just a half-inch long shell on its back. It carries with it the fate of the river, says the scientist studying the snail's struggle to survive. "They are the bottom rung of the ladder, but all the other animals in the river depend on them," said Dr. Paul Johnson, a research scientist with Tennessee Aquarium Research Institute. The institute is a part of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, but Johnson's laboratory is at a University of Georgia fish hatchery in Cohutta, Ga. Johnson has spent years studying the snails and mussels living in rivers of the Southeast. He and a handful of scientists are now trying to find a way to ensure the plicate rocksnail doesn't follow 12 other Alabama species of rocksnails into extinction. Last week, Johnson and research technician Sabrina Novak stood thigh-deep in the chilly Locust Fork water collecting plicate rocksnails. They captured 100 to take to their lab, where they will try to breed them. They hope to use 21st century technology to rebuild a population decimated by 20th century development. Less than 100 years ago, plicate rocksnails were found the entire length of the Black Warrior River, Johnson said. Now they have been eliminated from more than 98 percent of their range. Sediment caused by runoff from strip mines and nearby development settled in the slow-moving portions of the river, making those areas uninhabitable for the snails. Today, the snails only survive where the water moves swiftly across shoals and sediment doesn't settle. That limits the snails to only a few shoals along a 20-mile stretch of the river between U.S. 78 and Interstate 65. But Johnson's worries are growing. When he surveyed the river in November, he found snails on only 15 of the 32 shoals he examined. Because of that decline, plicate rocksnails are listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as an endangered species. There are only six species of rocksnails left in Alabama. Three of them are listed as endangered, and the other three should be listed, Johnson said. "This is the environmental problem that nobody knows about,"Johnson said. "People know about the whales and spotted owls, but those are just the tip of the iceberg. We have lost more snails and mussels than all other animals combined. They are small, cryptic and fit in a shoe box and nobody knows about them. And as bad as the last century was, scientists expect the extinction rate to double in the next few years." Distinct species: University of Alabama researchers have assisted Johnson. Geneticists analyzed the DNA of the different aquatic snails and determined each was a distinct species. That finding helped Johnson obtain money from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for his work, said conservation geneticist Charles Lydeard, who did the genetic work at UA. As Johnson and Novak collected their brood snails last week, they anchored 50 vinyl plates to the river bottom. They will collect the plates in April. Johnson said he wants to see whether snails will lay their eggs on the squares of vinyl. That would give researchers more young snails to work with. It will also tell Johnson what will work best in efforts to grow snails in captivity. The methods Johnson is using were successful in increasing the population of the Spring River snail in Tennessee, he said. Johnson wants to accomplish more with his research than saving the plicate rocksnail. He wants to perfect methods that will help save other snail species with dwindling populations. Johnson said 60 percent of the country's aquatic snails are endangered, their habitats damaged by sediment or eliminated by dredging and dam building. But for the moment and for the plicate rocksnail, Johnson and Novak will raise the water temperature in their lab to one ideal for snail breeding, 65 to 67 degrees. In the wild, only about 5 percent of the eggs laid by the snails hatch and grow into adults. That number should be about 15 percent in the lab, Johnson said. When they are grown, the lab snails will be reintroduced to the river. Johnson will deposit them in places to strengthen existing populations and maybe create new ones. And perhaps someday the plicate rocksnail will crawl back from the brink. "That's what we hope," Johnson said. |
Pitcher Plants II by Walter Inglis Anderson, reproduced courtesy of the family of Walter Anderson. |
Lowell Urbatsch obtained
permission to use the Anderson watercolor for publicizing the LSU Herbarium
celebration. Anderson, born in New Orleans in 1903 and lived much
of his life in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, until his death in 1965. He
studied at the Parsons Institute of Design in New York , the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, and in Europe where he was influenced by the art
he viewed in Neolithic caves. Later influences were the plants and
animals of his Gulf Coast environment, especially Horn Island, a barrier
island almost twenty miles away that he visited by rowboat. The Walter
Anderson Museum of Art at 510 Washington Avenue, and Shearwater Pottery
on Shearwater Drive, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, are less that two hours
away and are well worth a visit.
His illustrations have appeared in a number of books, some of which he also authored:
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