Wednesdays are busy at the Biology Department on the first floor of Gilmer Hall–five laboratories are running concurrently. At the east end of the hall, Dr. Lowry’s ecology students are getting their hands dirty collecting the rhizomes of hops (Humulus lupus) plants from the pots in which they have spent the winter. The hops plants will be used in Dr. Lowry’s breeding program to develop a vigorous hops that will grow in this area and can be used to brew local beers. Just across the hall, Dr. Shear’s biodiversity students are constructing Baermann Pans they will use to extract meiofauna from samples of soil and moss. Later, they will spend most of the afternoon on a detailed dissection of a squid, an animal with a body plan radically different from our own. A little further down, Dr. Gorski is running a lab full of introductory students getting their first exposure to restriction enzymes and electrophoresis through a simulation of DNA forensics. Meanwhile, Dr. Wolyniak has his genetics class working with their laptops to find homologous sequences of a gene they are studying on BLAST in order to trace its evolution. At the west end of the hall, Dr. Hargadon’s  immunology lab works to purify RNA from dendritic cell lysates.  The lysates came from the spleens of mice that had received different treatments.  Over the next few weeks, the students will perform reverse transcription and real-time PCR to quantify the expression of the IP-10 chemokine gene.

Our department believes in giving undergraduate students a broad background in all areas of biology, as well as providing stimuli that will raise questions among students and encourage them to embark on their own research investigations.  A typical Wednesday afternoon is just one example of how we do this!