Dr. Rachel Goodman and several students in her Ecology class (BIOL 203) spent an afternoon at York River State Park in the fall of 2012.  We took a guided canoe tour of Taskinas Creek and learned about tidal wetlands and the important roles they play in dampening storm surges and serving as nurseries for many species in the Chesapeake Bay.  We spotted some of the unique animals that inhabit this community, including a few species of crabs (Daniel Adams holding one below) and several bird species.  We also took out seines and dip nets to catch a few fish (Hakeem Mohammed and Jason Haas seining below).

Elliott Assistant Professor of Biology Dr. Kristian M. Hargadon will be one of two keynote speakers at the Harker Research Symposium at The Harker School in San Jose, CA in April.  Delivering the other keynote address will be Dr. David Baltimore, who received the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of reverse transcriptase and the role of RNA viruses in tumor cell transformation.  Dr. Hargadon was invited to speak about his cancer research at Hampden-Sydney as well as about his story as a scholar-athlete and the role played by both academics and athletics in his life.  His address is entitled “From Gym Rat to Tumor Immunologist:  A Scholar Athlete’s Path to Cancer Research.”  Additional information can be found at the following link:  http://www.harker.org/page.cfm?p=2683

Eliott Assistant Professor of Biology Dr. Kristian M. Hargadon ’01 was recently invited and selected to serve as Guest Associate Editor and to host a Research Topic on Tumor Cell/Dendritic Cell Interactions and the Influence of Tumors on Dendritic Cell-mediated Anti-Tumor Immune Responses and Dendritic Cell-Based Tumor Immunotherapies for the scientific journal Frontiers in Tumor Immunity.  As Associate Editor, Dr. Hargadon will work with leading investigators across the globe and recruit contributions of a series of manuscripts to be published in a special issue of the journal dedicated to tumor/dendritic cell interactions, Dr. Hargadon’s own area of research expertise.  This is an excellent opportunity for fostering collaborations in this field and bringing focus to this important area of cancer research.

Zac Cranston ’14 and “CremePhraiche”, a bacteriophage he discovered on the H-SC campus

The Molecular Biology class took a field trip to the University of Mary Washington to use their electron microscopy facility as part of the class’ ongoing participation in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance.  This marks the second year of H-SC’s participation in a nationwide study focused on the collection and characterization of new bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, from the environment.  UMW Drs. Lynn Lewis and Kathy Loesser-Casey kindly gave the class their time and expertise in helping them to take electron micrographs of their bacteriophages which they will use to better understand the properties of each strain.  Representative DNA samples from the class’ collection have been sent to the University of Pittsburgh for sequencing, and analysis of the sequence will take place at H-SC over the spring semester.

Elsevier Publishing, one of the largest international publishers of scientific journals, has informed Dr. Bill Shear that his article (coauthored with Dr. Greg Edgecombe of the British Museum of Natural History) is one of the top five most-cited articles in the journal Arthropod Structure and Development for 2009-2011.

Recognition as “most-cited” means that other articles published subsequently have referenced Shear & Edgecombe’s article more often than any others.

The article, “The geological record and phylogeny of the Myriapoda,” brings together current and past information on fossils and molecular relationships of this important mega-diverse class of animals, which includes millipedes and centipedes.  Dr. Shear is recognized as a leading authority on millipedes, and Dr. Edgecombe on centipedes.

Full citation:  Shear, W. A., & Edgecombe, G. D.  2009.  The geological record and phylogeny of the Myriapoda.  Arthropod Structure and Development 39(2-3):174-190.

Dr. Hargadon and 3 H-SC students (Chad Harte ’09, Osric Forrest ’11, and Yonathan Ararso ’12) recently published their collaborative research on suppression of dendritic cells by melanoma in the American Journal of Immunology. This work characterized the effects of melanoma-derived factors on the maturation and activation of two dendritic cell lines, DC2.4 and JAWSII. While both cell lines were suppressed by the murine melanoma B16-F1, the extent of this suppression differed. Both costimulatory molecule and proinflammatory cytokine/chemokine production were altered in DC2.4 cells, while cytokine/chemokine was largely unaffected in JAWSII dendritic cells (though costimulatory molecules were still suppressed). These results highlight the utility of these dendritic cell lines for studying melanoma-associated suppression of dendritic cells and suggest that these cell lines will serve as important research tools for understanding factors that regulate resistance versus susceptibility to different aspects of tumor-associated suppression of dendritic cells!

The National Library of Medicine recently released the complete annotated sequence of Arturo, a mycobacteriophage discovered on campus by Duncan Oliphant ’12 and annotated in the spring 2012 semester by H-SC’s Genomics class (Barron Frazier ’12, James Hughes ’14, Carter Mavromatis ’12, Kris Miller ’13, Jonathan Park ’12, and Greg Robertson ’12).  Arturo is 51500 basepairs long and contains 87 coding sequences believed to encode distinct proteins.  Below is a link to the published genomic data:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/407437696

13 H-SC students are currently isolating a fresh crop of bacteriophage from the environment for characterization and molecular analysis in connection with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Science Education Alliance (SEA).

Congratulations to our student authors!!!

Each October, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference for Undergraduate Scholarship (MARCUS) is held at Sweet Briar College and provides an opportunity for undergraduates to meet and share their research work across all disciplines.  This year, 4 Hampden-Sydney biology students presented past and ongoing research work done in conjunction with faculty in H-SC’s Biology Department.  Christian Lehman ’14 did an oral presentation on his project on the genetics of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana:

Christian Lehman ’14 in his presentation

The afternoon poster session had three H-SC research presentations: Alan Fish ’14 with his work on cell division in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae), Francis Polakiewicz ’14 with summer work on a virus spreading through turtle populations, and Brandon Fox ’14 describing his work in using the new field of synthetic biology to create a means using E. coli by which disease spread through a population may be modeled.

Alan Fish ’14

Francis Polakiewicz ’14

Brandon Fox ’14