Julie Huber to lead research vessel Falkor cruise
Bay Paul Center Assistant Scientist Julie Huber, will lead a cruise on the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor to the summit of the Axial Seamount. They hope to understand how the viral and microbial communities that live in the rocky outer layer of a submarine volcano interact and alter the flow of carbon and [...]
Susie Theroux awarded her Ph.D.
Speaking to a live audience in Providence and over videolink to Woods Hole, Susanna Theroux defended her dissertation on November 28th, 2012. Theroux described her doctoral research that was completed in collaboration between the labs of Dr. Yongsong Huang at Brown University’s Department of Geological Sciences and Dr. Linda Amaral-Zettler at the MBL’s Bay Paul [...]
Anupriya Dutta awarded her Ph.D.
On December 5, 2012, Brown-MBL Graduate Student, Anupriya Dutta, successfully defended her PhD dissertation, ‘Recognizing microRNAs (miRNAs) in Microinvertebrates and Confirming their Absence.’ Bdelloid rotifers are aquatic microinvertebrates that have several outstanding qualities among metazoans. They make up the only ancient asexual animal lineage. Bdelloid rotifers are also incredibly robust to DNA damage, which is [...]
Systems-level analysis of microbial community organization through combinatorial labeling and spectral imaging
Valm, Alex M., Jessica L. Mark Welch, Christopher W. Rieken, Yuko Hasegawa, Mitchell L. Sogin, Rudolf Oldenbourg, Floyd E. Dewhirst, and Gary G. Borisy (USA) 108: 4152-4157 Bacteria in nature live not as isolated cells, but as members of a community in which many different kinds of bacteria live intermingled in complex associations. The spatial [...]
Microbial community composition in sediments resists perturbation by nutrient enrichment
A paper from Mitch Sogin and Hilary Morrison et al A microbial community’s functional capability—what it eats, what it produces—is thought by some to be more meaningful than the identities of its members. Functional redundancy in bacterial communities thus allows communities to survive environmental disturbance even if the membership changes. Others believe that microbial communities [...]
A widespread class of reverse transcriptase-related cellular genes
Publication by Eugene A. Gladyshev, Irina R. Arkhipova We describe a novel class of single-copy reverse transcriptase (RT)-related genes that do not constitute part of any mobile genetic element, and are clearly distinct from the only known non-mobile RT genes, the telomerases, which maintain chromosome ends in eukaryotes. These RT-like genes are of ancient origin, [...]