Biology Department

individually tailored preparation for graduate and professional work

Biology department receives grant to support purchase of new equipment

Posted on November 16, 2013 by admin

The Biology department has received $10,200 for the purchase of laboratory equipment related to the teaching of synthetic biology, or the construction of biological “machines” in bacteria based on precise DNA parts, from the Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT). GCAT, founded and directed by Dr. A. Malcolm Campbell at Davidson College, provides training and development opportunities to build classroom-based research experiences in genomics and synthetic biology. The H-SC grant, made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to GCAT, will enable the biology department to purchase updated technology for the amplification and screening of DNA for research in both independent and classroom settings.

H-SC phage researchers present work at “Phage Phaire 2013”

Posted on November 16, 2013 by admin

Hampden-Sydney’s Biology department has been affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) program since 2011. The program has provided a research network centered on viral discovery and research that has given 23 H-SC biologists first-hand research experience in the last two years. Two of these students, James Hughes ’14 and Daniel Osarfo-Akoto ’15, have been doing independent research projects on phage discovery and characterization and accompanied the departments Dr. Mike Wolyniak to James Madison University to present their research at “Phage Phaire 2013”.

Hughes, Wolyniak, and Osarfo-Akoto after a long day of science

The gathering was organized by the biology department at JMU and consisted of students from JMU, Hampden-Sydney, VCU, and Mary Washington who have been working on the SEA-PHAGES project. Representatives from HHMI and guest speakers from NC State University were also on hand.

James with a large crowd at his research poster

Daniel explaining his research to JMU undergraduates

The SEA-PHAGES project is continuing at Hampden-Sydney in 2014 in the form of genomic sequence analysis in Biology 313 (Genomics) in the spring semester and the isolation and characterization of a new set of phages in Biology 312 (Molecular Biology) in the fall semester.

6 H-SC students present research work at Sigma Xi national meeting

Posted on November 12, 2013 by admin

The Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society held its annual student research conference in Durham, NC as an opportunity for science students ranging from the high school to postdoctoral level to present their research progress in a professional setting. Six Hampden-Sydney students presented their research at this meeting, which was attended by students from all over the United States and from large research institutions including Duke, Cornell, the University of Rochester, and Georgetown.

Team Hampden-Sydney

The meeting gave the Hampden-Sydney students the opportunity to receive outside feedback on their research and to get experience in how a professional meeting work in the biological sciences. Workshop opportunities allowed students to learn about career opportunities in science journalism and finding summer research opportunities.

Alan Fish ’14

Christian Lehman ’14

Francis Polakiewicz ’14

Gio Torres ’14

Davis Carter ’15

James Hughes ’14

Drake Bishop ’14, Dr. Kristian Hargadon ’01 Present Melanoma Research at ASM Conference

Posted on November 11, 2013 by admin

On Friday, November 8 H-SC senior biology major Drake Bishop and Elliott Assistant Professor of Biology Dr. Kristian Hargadon ’01 presented their research on melanoma-associated suppression of dendritic cells at the University of Virginia at the VA Branch Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Drake began his research project in collaboration with Dr. Hargadon through the H-SC Student/Faculty Summer Fellowship Program, and he is currently extending this work throughout this academic year for his Senior Honors Project in Biology. This work builds off of previous in vitro data from the Hargadon Laboratory demonstrating melanoma-associated suppression of the maturation and activation of dendritic cell lines. Dendritic cells are critical regulators of host immune responses that often control the activation versus tolerization of an immune response. Drake’s work has extended earlier studies by examining how melanoma-derived factors impact the maturation and activation of dendritic cells isolated from the spleens of mice. In this ex vivo system, Drake has demonstrated that the activity of these bonafide dendritic cells is also altered by melanoma-derived factors, and he has identified partial roles for TGFbeta1 and VEGF-A in this tumor-induced immune suppression. Next year, Drake will be attending Eastern Virginia Medical School, where he was accepted as a sophomore through the College’s early acceptance articulation agreement. He plans to specialize in immunology!

Drake Bishop (left) and Dr. Hargadon (right) with their poster

Professor Werth’s research travels on sabbatical

Posted on November 4, 2013 by admin

I am away on sabbatical leave for the entire 2013-14 academic year, taking a break from teaching, advising, committee work and other college duties to focus on my research. At the end of August my family and I drove across the country, which was an adventure in itself (with stops at Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, the Badlands and Grand Tetons, etc.). We are spending the fall in Vancouver, Canada, where I am a Visiting Professor of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. I love to teach, but after returning from my May Term Evolutionary Ecology field course in mainland Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands it has been nice to set coursework aside. Please note, however, that a sabbatical is not a vacation. I am enjoying a change of pace and change of surroundings, yet working hard to conduct and write up research in ways I seldom get at Hampden-Sydney. I am concentrating on my whale research but working on other projects as well, as I will explain.

I am enjoying lots of hikes under the huge trees of the coastal rain forest, but I have seen many marine mammals in the wild and in captivity, including humpback whales, killer whales, beluga whales, Pacific white-sided dolphins, Dall’s and harbor porpoises, Steller and California sea lions, harbor seals, and sea otters, not to mention loads of other cool wildlife, from eagles and other big birds to coyotes and giant slugs (which I have to watch out for as I run through the woods in the morning). It is beautiful here where the mountains meet the sea—or at least it is if you can see through the misty fog which often shrouds the shoreline.

My whale research currently focuses on the biomechanics and functional morphology of feeding in mysticete whales (like humpback and blue whales), and especially on the oral material, called baleen, which filters food from the water that flows into the mouth. Baleen is made of keratin, just like your hair and fingernails, and I am finding that although it is often described as a simple sieve, it is actually not at all a sieve but rather a highly dynamic filter whose porosity and other parameters varies according to flow conditions. In this respect I am working with engineers and physicists who study such things as cell filtration, hydrodynamics and hydraulics, and parachute deployment.

Last spring I was contacted by a Dutch engineer who asked me to join a collaborative project, inspired by a whale that washed up on the beach in the Netherlands, involving filtration in the humpback whale. The goal is to recreate the whale’s oral filter using 3D scanning and 3D printing—popular everywhere now, but especially in the Netherlands—so that engineers can design better filters and so we can better understand how whales catch prey and separate it from engulfed water.

This project involves biomimicry, which means creating industrial applications inspired by nature. Think of Velcro closures based on spiny burrs and other “sticky” plant seeds, or special racing swimsuits inspired by shark skin. Other examples include paint pigments based on iridescent scales of butterflies and super-sticky adhesives inspired by the glue on byssal threads that attach barnacles to rocks. Our biomimetic plan is to study whale filters, and in particular to create differently scaled 3D-printed models of varying pliancy, mimicking the way the whale’s oral filter really works.

Thus I spent two weeks of September dashing around Holland on trains, giving four lectures and a workshop while meeting with physicists, engineers, and industrial designers. One of the talks I gave was at a 3D printing conference at a polymer science park, where I felt out of place as the only biologist and non-Dutch speaker. I spent time at a shipyard in Delft, a natural history museum in Leiden, a model-making factory in Hengelo, and university campuses in and around Zwolle, mostly working with people from the Windesheim University of Applied Sciences. I had a little free time to explore the Dutch countryside but mostly worked with researchers and students. This is a project that is expected to continue for the next two or three years. I’ve picked up a bit of Dutch language, though the translation doesn’t always work well either way (see: http://www.windesheim.nl/over-windesheim/persberichten/2013/september/gastcollege-dr-alex-werth-over-evolutietheorie-en-darwin/).

I am traveling with my family to New Zealand to speak at a marine mammal conference in December. While in New Zealand I will spend time meeting with research colleagues and—ideally—seeing whales, dolphins, seals and sea lions, penguins, and other wildlife and scenic beauty in the North and South Islands. Fortunately, December is summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

In addition to my whale research I have been working hard to finish several publications on evolutionary biology, focusing especially on the evolution of form in organisms—or rather, why some forms seem not to evolve over long stretches of time. One such paper (with Professor Shear of the H-SC Biology Department) focuses on “living fossils” like horseshoe crabs and coelacanths. How and why do they stay the same? I wrote a second paper on vestigial features of evolution and development: leftover remnants of biological change reflecting earlier states. A third paper centers on the potential scientific and philosophical limits of evolutionary explanations, and a fourth paper, co-written with a historian/philosopher colleague from the University of Minnesota, looks at what we call the “naturalizing error.” Philosophers often speak of the “naturalistic fallacy” (that is, you can’t equate what you see in nature with how you ought to behave), but we’ve flipped the script and explain that people’s tendency to describe nature through the lens of personal preconception leads to biased analyses. For example, museum displays of Neanderthals typically present a “nuclear family” of parents and two children, which tells more about how we currently see ourselves than what likely occurred in the past.

That’s the short version of what I’ve been up to—I’m leaving out all the gory details—and I can continue to update folks on my sabbatical activities, especially my research studies and travels, with this blog. Meanwhile I hope everyone back at H-SC is enjoying a great year. We miss everyone!

IT IS HERE! Flow Cytometry Comes To H-SC!

Posted on October 24, 2013 by admin

In its ongoing efforts to stay at the forefront of cutting-edge laboratory technology, the Hampden-Sydney College Biology Department recently acquired a BD Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer, the leading model in the recent wave of “personalized” benchtop flow cytometers. Although the cost and space required to operate flow cytometers once limited their use to large research intensive universities with core facilities dedicated solely to their operation, the emergence of benchtop cytometers has revolutionized this field and made this technology a reality for undergraduate education. The Accuri C6 Cytometer has a plethora of applications in a variety of fields in the biological sciences. It has the ability to measure up to 6 parameters on a single cell, and a population of millions of cells can be analyzed at the single-cell level in a matter of minutes. Applications include phenotyping of both cell surface and intracellular molecules, assaying cell viability, cytotoxicity, and proliferation, analyzing cell cycle progression and DNA content, quantifying total/subsets of cells in a population, and monitoring intracellular calcium levels in response to different stimuli, just to name a few! This instrument will be utilized by H-SC students in a number of laboratory courses offered by the Department, and it will also be used by both students and faculty conducting independent and collaborative research projects, contributing greatly to the diversity and depth of these studies! We are so excited to have this new technology, and we are anxious to begin our flow cytometric studies at H-SC!!!

The Accuri C6 Flow Cytometer, it is a thing of beauty!

Davis Carter presents at VA Herpetological Society

Posted on October 15, 2013 by admin

E. Davis Carter ’15 presented a poster, “Survey of Herpetofauna and Ranavirus at Hampden-Sydney College,” at the annual meeting of the Virginia Herpetological Society in Richmond. The October 5 meeting was attended by academics, fish and wildlife managers, and hobbyists from around the state. His poster resulted from work conducted during this semester as an Independent Study course and research in the previous summer funded by Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and the HSC Student-Faculty Summer Research Program.

Sandy River Reservoir Cleanup

Posted on October 15, 2013 by admin

Fourteen students from Dr. Goodman’s Environmental Biology course, Circle K International club, and the International Club at HSC volunteered for a cleanup at Sandy River Reservoir despite the drizzly grey day on October 14. This event was organized through Clean Virginia Waterways and the Ocean Conservancy.

We had 14 people work to collect 8 bags full of about 70 pounds of trash, including 400 cigarette butts!

To find out more about Clean Virginia Waterways and the cleanup events they have all over VA: http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/Index.html

To can find out more about the Ocean Conservancy and the great, international work they do: http://www.oceanconservancy.org/

Studying evolution with the bean beetle

Posted on October 9, 2013 by admin

Evolution by natural selection is the uniting principle behind all of biology. This semester, Hampden-Sydney introductory biology students are studying evolution using the bean beetle (Callosobruchus maculatus), an agricultural pest that lives off of beans and which normally resides in the subtropics of Africa and Asia.

Bean beetle adult and egg (white dot) on the surface of a mung bean (http://www.beanbeetles.org)

The students are doing an experiment in which they simulate a “bottleneck effect”…….if large beetles are separated from small beetles and only allowed to mate with beetles of the same size, will all the offspring be the same size as their parents? The experiment required the students to get a crash course in weighing and moving beetles and generating new beetle crosses.

Isolating beetles and setting up a cross

Catching a runaway beetle with forceps

The beetles will lay eggs on supplied mung beans, and the larvae and pupae will develop inside them. When the adults emerge after 3-4 weeks, the students will find out how well the size of the beetle can be influenced by artificially selecting the parents. The use of bean beetles is a new approach towards allowing Hampden-Sydney students to take a hands-on approach to the study of evolution.

Biology student Opening Convocation honors

Posted on September 18, 2013 by admin

As part of the beginning of the academic year, Hampden-Sydney holds an convocation ceremony attended by the entire campus community. At this year’s ceremony, the College honored three biology students as academic leaders in the Hampden-Sydney community.

First, Aaron Gilani ’15, a dual biology and psychology major, was given the President’s Award for Scholarship and Character, an award “…presented to a junior who has excelled in the classroom at Hampden-Sydney and who also demonstrates the quality of character that enriches the life of the campus community.”

Hampden-Sydney President Chris Howard and Aaron Gilani ’15 at the Convocation ceremony

Meade Edmunds ’14 was then presented with the President’s Award for Academic Excellence in the Natural Sciences and Mathematics, given to the senior with the highest GPA in a major within the division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

President Howard and Meade Edmunds ’14

Finally, the President’s Award for Overall Academic Excellence, presented to the senior with the highest overall GPA, was given to James Hughes ’14.

President Howard and James Hughes ’14