- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Vladimir Burmistrov, an alumnus of the Bruce Hammock lab in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, has won the President's Award for Young Ph.Ds in Russia, a grant awarded annually by the President of Russia to the best young (under 35 years of age) Ph.D. in various fields of science.
Burmistrov plans to spend some of the grant money to return to UC Davis in 2016 to work with Hammock, researcher Christophe Morissseau and other colleagues.
Burmistrov is with the Department of Chemistry, Technology and Equipment of Chemical Industry, Volzhsky Polytechnic Institute (Branch) Volgograd State Technical University. He works as a docent at the Volgograd State Technical University, where he received his doctorate in 2013.
He is also continuing his research that he started in graduate school. “I focus on synthesis of new isocyanates and the ways of its applying,” Burmistrov said. “ When I started to develop ureas from my isocyanates I came across the research being performed at UC Davis and met Professor Hammock, Christophe Morisseau and the others. Now we collaborate in an area of human soluble epoxide hydrolase inhibitors.”
Hammock, Morisseau, Burmistrov and other colleagues recently published work in the Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, on “Symmetric Adamantyl-Diureas as Soluble Epoxide Hydrolase Inhibitors.”
Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology, holds a joint appointment with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. He directs the NIEHS-UC Davis Superfund Research Program or the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hammock is also the principal investigator of the NIH Biotechnology Training Program at UC Davis.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Staff research associate/beekeeper Billy Synk worked with and assisted photographer Anand Varma's needs for a year in the development of the illustrated article. Extension apiculturist emeritus Eric Mussen, who retired last June after 38 years of service, served as a research fact-checker, contacted by National Geographic.
The article, authored by Charles Mann asked “Can the world's most important pollinators be saved?' and pondered “how scientists and breeders are trying to create a hardier honeybee.”
Varma's time-lapse video of 2500 images, showing the development of eggs to pupae to adults, was filmed at the Laidlaw apiary. Two still photos, of a bee in flight, and a close-up of an emerging worker bee, were also taken in the Laidlaw apiary.
In his article, Mann touches on RNAi and quotes bee researcher Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” as saying “If you target one specific area, the organism will always make an end run around it.” She advocates a “healthier, stronger” bee, or what Mann writes as “one that can fight (varroa) mites and disease on its own, without human assistance.”
Spivak was the keynote speaker at the Bee Symposium, hosted May 9 by the Honey and Pollination Center in the UC Davis Conference Center. It drew a crowd of 360.
Spivak and John Harbo of the USDA's research center in Baton Rouge, La. “both succeeded in breeding versions of hygienic bees by the late 1990s,” Mann writes. “A few years after that, scientists realized that hygienic bees are less effective as the mites grow more numerous.”
Both Spivak and Varma have presented TED talks on honey bees.
Spivak: Why Bees Are Disappearing
Varma: A Thrilling Look at the First 21 Days of a Bee's Life
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Find out at the Bohart Museum of Entomology open house from 1 to 4 p.m., Sunday, May 17 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane.
The theme is "Name That Bug! How About Bob?"
Officials at the Bohart Museum and the California Department of Food and Agriculture will explain how insects are named. There also will be family arts-and-crafts activities. The event is free and open to the public.
The Bohart Museum sponsors a nonprofit biolegacy program, an opportunity to name an insect after you or a loved one. This is a lasting dedication and will help support future research and discovery at the Bohart, said Lynn Kimsey, museum director and a professor of entomology at UC Davis.
For example, there's a new wasp species named “The Bockler Wasp,” thanks to a concerted drive to memorialize a beloved science teacher, and the taxonomy work of the Bohart Museum and the BioLegacy Program.
When award-winning biology teacher Donald “Doc Boc” Bockler of Arlington (Mass.) High School, died at age 65 of an apparent heart attack on Sept. 2, 2008 at his home, two of his former students from the Class of 1993--Tabatha Bruce Yang of the Bohart Museum and Margaret Dredge Moore of Arlington--launched a fundraising drive to name an insect after him.
They selected a newly discovered species in the genus Lanthanomyia and sought the name, Lanthanomyia bockleri.
Senior museum scientist Heydon recently published his work on Lanthanomyia bockleri Heydon in Zootaxa, a worldwide mega-journal for zoological taxonomists and the name is now official.
“Once an article goes through the scientific review process and is published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, the name of the new species is official and immortalized in the scientific literature,” explained Kimsey.
Kimsey described species-naming as “a unique, lasting form of dedication” and “a great honor both for the person giving the name and for the individual or other honoree whose name is being given to the species.”
Heydon said Lanthanomyia is a genus whose species are restricted to central and southern Chile and adjacent parts of Argentina. The new species is found in the Nothofagus forests of Patagonian Chile, including Chiloe Island. It belongs to a family of parasitic wasps called the Pteromalidae. “Unlike other related species, this one has a unique dorsal attachment of the head to the thorax. If you see a specimen of Lanthanomyia with the neck attaching close to the top of the head, you know it is bockleri,” Heydon said. “Adults are reared from galls on Nothofagus and are thought to be parasites of gall-forming weevils.”
“Donald Bockler was fascinated by evolution and nature and he would have been proud,” said Yang, education and outreach coordinator at the Bohart Museum. Like many other Bockler students, she credits him for influencing her decision to pursue a career in science.
For more information, and to get a list of species available for naming, contact bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
One of the displays at Sunday's open house will be by entomologist Jeff Smith, associate at the Bohart Museum, who will be displaying monarch butterflies in various stages of pinning. A mishap occurred at an unknown California wedding: 300 monarchs were to be released but all perished in the box. "Now we are using them for a static display (as opposed to hands-on)," Smith said.
The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum.
Special attractions include a “live” petting zoo, featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. Visitors are invited to hold the insects and photograph them.
The museum's gift shop, open year around, includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.
The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. The museum is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free. Open houses, focusing on specific themes, are held on weekends throughout the academic year.
The last open house of the year is "Moth Night," set from 8 to 11 p.m., Saturday, July 18 on the grounds just outside the Bohart Museum. Participants will learn how to collect moths and identify them.
More information on the Bohart Museum is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or Tabatha Yang, education and public outreach coordinator at tabyang@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The seminar is from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. Nematologist Steve Nadler, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will introduce the speaker.
"Hookworms are important parasites of humans and animals, infecting over 750 million people worldwide," says Hawdon. "In heavy infections they cause anemia and impair physical and cognitive development, and are particularly problematic in children, the elderly and pregnant women. A better understanding of the molecular biology of hookworm infection is required for the development of rational controls strategies and new drugs."
"The infective third stage larva (L3) is developmentally arrested until it enters a permissive host, when it receives a host-specific signal that initiates developmental pathways and progression to the adult stage. The obligate requirement for a vertebrate host makes studying the infective process of hookworms difficult. Fortunately, the L3 is analogous to the dauer stage of free-living nematodes such as C. elegans, and recovery from dauer has been used as a model for the resumption of development that occurs during infection. Using an in vitro assay, our lab has described and characterized an “activated” larval state in response to host like conditions. We have demonstrated the presence of conserved signaling pathways controlling activation, as well as conserved molecular components, between hookworms and C. elegans. I will discuss these advances and the role of activation in the life history of hookworms and similar parasitic nematodes.'
Hawdon has served as an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, George Washington University, since 2005, and an associate professor, Microbiology and Tropical Medicine, at the George Washington University Medical Center, since 2000.
Hawdon received his bachelor's degree in animal bioscience in 1981 from Penn State University and his doctorate in parasitology from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the MacArthur Center for Molecular Parasitology, Yale University School of Medicine, from 1991 to 1994. He then served as an associate research scientist, Medical Helminthology Laboratory, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, at the Yale University School of Medicine.
Hawdon is a past president of the Helminthological Society of Washington and a member of the American Society of Parasitology. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Parasitology.
Plans call for the seminar to be video-recorded for later viewing on UCTV.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The seminar is from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. Assistant professor Brian Johnson will host and introduce her.
"The evolution of highly cooperative, eusocial behavior from solitary ancestry represents one of the major transitions in the evolution of life," says Toth, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology, Department of Entomology. "Thus, understanding the evolution of insect eusociality can provide important insights into the evolution of complexity. Recently, with the advent of the genomic era, there has been great interest in understanding the molecular underpinnings of social behavior and its evolution. Several hypotheses about how eusociality have been proposed; these ideas can be roughly divided into two camps—one proposes that eusociality involved new (novel, or rapidly evolving) genes, and the other, that old (deeply conserved) genes took on new functions via shifts in gene regulation."
In her seminar, Toth will provide an overview of recent research in her laboratory aiming to address the genomic basis of social evolution in insects, with a focus on gene expression. "Utilizing a comparative approach involving multiple species and lineages of bees and wasps, as well as de novo sequencing of genomes, transcriptomes, and epigenomes, our work aims to trace the types of genomic changes related to the evolutionary transition from solitary to eusocial behavior," she said.
Toth will present results from several lines of research mainly focused on primitively social Polistes paper wasps, that have led to the following insights:
- Relatively minor shifts in gene expression patterns may accompany earlier stages of social evolution
- Convergent evolution of social behavior in different lineages involves similar gene expression patterns in a small set of key pathways, and
- Epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation are variable across species and evolutionarily labile.
"Although more data on additional solitary and social species, and on novel genes, are needed, the emerging picture is that earlier transitions from solitary to simple eusociality involved relatively small changes in gene expression and regulation," she said.
Toth said she is especially interested in the mechanisms and evolution of insect sociality, using paper wasps and honey bees as model systems.
Toth received her bachelor's degree in biology in 2006 from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and her doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology in 2006 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she was advised by major professor Gene Robinson. She did postdoctoral work with Christina Grozinger at Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pa. where she was a USDA postdoctoral fellow. She focused on uncovering conserved molecular pathways for social insect reproduction and social behavior. Earlier she was a postdoctoral research associate with the Department of Entomology and Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois, where she studied with advisor Gene Robinson. Her work centered on genomic analyses of insect social behavior.
Plans call for recording her seminar for later posting on UCTV.
Upcoming noon-hour speakers in 122 Briggs Hall are
May 20
John Hawdon
Topic: "Molecular Mechanisms of Hookworm Infection"
Research Center for Neglected Diseases of Poverty, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Tropical Medicine, The George Washington University
Washington, D.C.
Nominator/host: Steve Nadler
May 27
John "Jack" Longino
Title of Seminar: "Project ADMAC: Ant Diversity of the Mesoamerican Corridor"
Professor of Biology
Adjunct Curator of Entomology, Utah Museum of Natural History, University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
Nominator/host: Phil Ward, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
June 3
Mike Singer
Title of Seminar: "One Butterfly, Six Host Shifts"
Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, College of Natural Sciences
Specialty: Butterfly ecology and behavior
(Formerly with University of Texas, Austin, Texas)
Nominator/host: Meredith Cenzer, graduate student, Louie Yang lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
