- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
No, it's the mosquito.
Infected mosquitoes transmit diseases that account for some 750,000 deaths a year, according to a recent article in Science Alert.
The mosquito is a piece of work. Remember when several UC Davis scientists were featured in a KQED-produced science video on "How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood?"
So when noted molecular neurobiologist Leslie Vosshall of the Rockefeller University, New York City, speaks on "Neurobiology of the World's Most Dangerous Animal" on Wednesday, May 24 at the University of California, Davis, her audience will not only learn just how dangerous the most dangerous animal is, but learn about her exciting research.
The hourlong seminar, free and open to the public, is set for 4:10 p.m. in the Student Community Center, UC Davis.
The Vosshall laboratory studies the molecular neurobiology of mosquitoes. Female mosquitoes require a blood meal to complete egg development, she explains. "In carrying out this innate behavior, mosquitoes spread dangerous infectious diseases such as malaria, dengue, Zika, Chikungunya and yellow fever."
"Some of the questions we are currently addressing are: Why are some people more attractive to mosquitoes than others? How do insect repellents work? How are multiple sensory cues integrated in the mosquito brain to elicit innate behaviors? How do female mosquitoes select a suitable body of water to lay their eggs? The long-term goal of all of our work is to understand how behaviors emerge from the integration of sensory input with internal physiological states."
The seminar is sponsored by the College of Biological Sciences and the Storer Life Sciences Endowment. Host is molecular geneticist Joanna Chiu, associate professor and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
At the Rockefeller University, Vosshall is the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior and director of the Kavli Neural Systems Institute. She is known for her work on the genetic basis of chemosensory behavior in both insects and humans.
Her notable contributions to science include the discovery of insect odorant receptors, and the clarification of general principles regarding their function, expression and the connectivity of the sensory neurons that express them to primary processing centers in the brain. She founded the Rockefeller University Smell Study in 2004 with the goal of understanding the mechanisms by which odor stimuli are converted to olfatory percepts.
Vosshall received her bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Columbia University, New York, in 1987 and her doctorate from Rockefeller University in 1993. Following postdoctoral work at Columbia University, she joined the Rockefeller faculty in 2000.
She is the recipient of the 2008 Lawrence C. Katz Prize from Duke University, the 2010 DART/NYU Biotechnology Award, and the 2011 Gill Young Investigator Award. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
For more information on the seminar, contact host Joanna Chiu at jcchiu@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Congratulations to the world's top 10 entomology departments, as listed today (April 3) in the long-awaited Times Higher Education's Center for World University Rankings.
The rankings show the University of Florida's Department of Entomology and Nematology as No. 1.
In California, the University of California, Riverside, is ranked No. 2, and UC Davis, No. 7. That's not a national statistic, but a global one. Kudos!
The list:
- University of Florida, 100 score
- University of California, Riverside, 95.23
- Cornell University, 91.95
- Kansas State University, 91.29
- North Carolina State University, 90.88
- Michigan State University, 90.74
- University of California, Davis, 89.88
- University of Georgia, 88.98
- Nanjing Agricultural University, China, 86.74
- University of São Paulo in Brazil, 86.74
The departments were scored in five peformance areas: Teaching (the learning environment); research (volume, income and reputation); citations (research influence); international outlook (staff students and research) and industry outcome (knowledge transfer). View the World University Rankings methodology here.
The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, based in Briggs Hall, is led by chair Steve Nadler and vice chair Joanna Chiu.
Interested in insect science? Be sure to visit the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's displays at the 103rd annual campuswide Picnic Day on Saturday, April 22. Last year thousands of visitors flocked to Briggs Hall; Bohart Museum of Entomology, home of nearly eight million insect specimens; and the Sciences Laboratory Building (nematology display). Here's what the department did last year. More information pending!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you want to know more about circadian timing and why "circadian timing is everything"--from human beings to fruit flies--don't miss the Science Café session on Wednesday night, March 8 at Davis.
Molecular geneticist Joanna Chiu, vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, will speak on "Circadian Timing Is Everything: From a Good Night's Sleep to Minimizing Insecticide Use" at the Science Café session at 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 8 in the G St. Wunderbar, 28 G St., Davis.
Professor Jared Shaw of the UC Davis Division of Math and Physical Science is hosting the informal session. Free and open to all interested persons, it is sponsored by the Capital Science Communicators and the UC Davis Department of Chemistry. Science Café events take place in casual settings and aim to feature an engaging conversation with a scientist about a particular topic.
Chiu, an associate professor who specializes in molecular genetics of animal behavior, joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty in June 2010. She received her doctorate in molecular genetics from the Department of Biology at New York University.
"All living things on our planet, from bacteria to humans, organize their daily activities around the perpetuating 24-hour day-night cycles, the result of earth rotating on its own axis and orbiting around the sun," Chiu says. "In order for organisms to anticipate predictable variations in their environment that naturally occurs over the 24-hour cycle and coordinate their physiology and behavior to perform at their best, they rely on an internal biological clock. At the science cafe presentation, I will discuss how this internal clock, termed the circadian clock, affects many important aspects of our lives, including the timing of when we feel tired and want to go to bed, the time-of-day our immune systems are most susceptible to pathogen attack, and even when medicines should be taken to give you 'the most bang for your buck.'" In addition, I will discuss the consequences of when the circadian clock is 'broken' or 'off-kilter' because of diseases, work-schedule, jetlag, and light pollution."
Back in 2011, Chiu and colleagues from Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, published their work on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, describing how they identified a new mechanism that slows down or speeds up the internal clock of fruit flies. That research, published in the journal Cell, has important implications: it could lead to discoveries on alleviating human sleep disorders.
By mutating one amino acid in a single protein, “we changed the speed of the internal clock and flies now ‘think' it is 16 hours a day instead of 24 hours a day,” Chiu explained in a 2011 interview. “Our goal, of course, is not to trick flies into thinking the day is shorter or longer, but to dissect this complex phospho-circuit (phosphorylation sites) that controls clock speed in metazoans.”
“Living organisms—plants, animals and even bacteria—have an internal clock or timer that helps them to determine the time of day," she said in that 2011 interview. "This internal clock is vital to their survival since it allows them to synchronize their activity to the natural environment, so that they can perform necessary tasks at biologically advantageous times of day.”
“A functional clock is required to generate proper circadian rhythms of physiology and behavior including the sleep-wake cycle, daily hormonal variations and mating rhythms,” Chiu said. “Based on genetics, molecular biology and biochemical experiments performed in many different model organisms, we know that the speed of the internal clock is controlled by a core set of circadian proteins."
So if you aren't getting that good night's sleep and you're wondering about that internal clock, be sure to head over to the G St. Wunderbar on March 8. You'll learn the connection between circadian timings and minimizing insecticide use, too.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Jessica, who is majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology, works in the Chiu lab on the Spotted Wing Drosophila (Drosophila suzukii or SWD), a serious pest of fruit crops. In collaboration with scientists in the U.S. and around the world, including Frank Zalom, UC Davis professor of entomology, West is surveying populations of SWD using next-generation sequencing to determine the extent of possible insecticide resistance.
“By correlating her results to insecticide bioassay data, she can start to understand the mechanisms of developing resistance and use this information to help the agricultural industries manage SWD in a more sustainable manner,” said Chiu, an assistant professor.
The UC Global Food Initiative “is a commitment to apply a laser focus on what UC can do as a public research university, in one of the most robust agricultural regions in the world, to take on one of the world's most pressing issues," said UC President Janet Napolitano. This includes research related to food security, health and sustainability.
West received a $2500 stipend. The selection committee said “Jessica's ability to articulate a novel, hypothesis-driven research idea and follow it up with a detailed plan stood out from the rest.”
Said Chiu: “Jessica wrote an outstanding research proposal, detailing how her project can contribute to the mission of the UC Global Food Initiative.”
West applied for--and received--membership in the Class of 2013, Research Scholars Program in Insect Biology (RSPIP), which was organized by three UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty (Jay Rosenheim, Louie Yang and Joanna Chiu) to provide undergraduates with closely mentored research experiences in biology. The program's goal is "to provide academically strong and highly motivated undergraduates with a multi-year research experience that cultivates skills that will prepare them for a career in biological research and useful for students whose career goals will take them to medical school, veterinary school, or graduate programs in any biological sub-discipline."
Undergraduates can easily feel like they are lost in the crowd, Chui said, and rarely get close mentorship from faculty or other research staff. The RSIBP program fills that bill. “It is highly competitive and being selected is not an easy feat in itself,” Chiu said. West was one of eight students from the pool of 50 applicants selected.
Insects can be used as model systems to explore virtually any area of biology (population biology; behavior and ecology; biodiversity and evolutionary ecology; agroecology; genetics and molecular biology; biochemistry and physiology; and cell biology).
The Chiu lab collaborates with the Zalom lab and with research groups at Oregon State University, Washington State University, North Carolina State University, University of Georgia, and Cornell University to develop pest management strategies to combat SWD. Most drosophila flies feed on spoiled fruits, but SWD prefers fresh fruit (berries and soft-skinned fruits). The national crop loss has been estimated at more than $700 million annually.
“As a result, to control pest population and reduce crop loss, growers now rely on preventive applications of broad-spectrum neuroactive insecticides,” Chiu explained. “The selection pressure for insecticide resistance is therefore extremely high and will likely lead to resistance development in SWD, which threatens the sustainability of these high value crops.”
“Our laboratory has already set up a large network of collaborators all over the world to support this project,” Chiu said. “Jessica regards this project as an opportunity to explore new research areas, while contributing to an urgent food crisis as the crop industries and growers all over the world are becoming gravely concerned. “
Jessica West and her mentor, Joanna Chui, are a good fit. And that should mean bad news for the spotted wing drosophila.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Who would have thought?
Who would have thought that ants are more closely related to bees than they are to most wasps?
In ground-breaking research to be published Oct. 21 in Current Biology, a team of UC Davis scientists and a colleague from the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History, has found that ants and bees are more genetically related to each other than they are to social wasps such as yellow jackets and paper wasps.
"Despite great interest in the ecology and behavior of these insects, their evolutionary relationships have never been fully clarified," said senior author and noted ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology at UC Davis. "In particular, it has been uncertain how ants—the world’s most successful social insects—are related to bees and wasps. We were able to resolve this question by employing next-generation sequencing technology and advances in bioinformatics. This phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of nesting, feeding and social behavior in Hymenoptera."
The researchers used state-of-the-art genome sequencing and bioinformatics to produce this significant research.
The six-member team: Ward; molecular geneticist and assistant professor Joanna Chiu; honey bee scientist and assistant professor Brian Johnson; doctoral student-researcher Marek Borowiec of the Ward lab; and postdoctoral researcher Joel Atallah of the Johnson lab, all with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; and visiting scientist Ernest K. Lee of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History.
Ants, bees and stinging wasps all belong to the aculeate (stinging) Hymenoptera clade -- the group in which social behavior is most extensively developed.
Said Chiu: “With a phylogeny or evolutionary progression that we think is reliable and robust, we can now start to understand how various morphological and/or behavioral traits evolved in these groups of insects, and even examine the genetic basis of these phenotypic changes.”
Said Johnson, whose lab studies the genetics, behavior, evolution and health of honey bees: "Using transcriptomics we were able to resolve a long standing question regarding the evolutionary relationships between stinging wasps, ants, and bees. We found that ants and bees are more closely related than previously thought. This result should be important for future studies focused on eusocial evolution, as it suggests that morphology may not be a good indicator of evolutionary relatedness in these groups of organisms."
The abstract: "Eusocial behavior has arisen in few animal groups, most notably in the aculeate Hymenoptera, a clade comprising ants, bees, and stinging wasps. Phylogeny is crucial to understanding the evolution of the salient features of these insects, including eusociality. Yet the phylogenetic relationships among the major lineages of aculeate Hymenoptera remain contentious. We address this problem here by generating and analyzing genomic data for a representative series of taxa. We obtain a single well-resolved and strongly supported tree, robust to multiple methods of phylogenetic inference. Apoidea (spheciform wasps and bees) and ants are sister groups, a novel finding that contradicts earlier views that ants are closer to ectoparasitoid wasps. Vespid wasps (paper wasps, yellow jackets, and relatives) are sister to all other aculeates except chrysidoids. Thus, all eusocial species of Hymenoptera are contained within two major groups, characterized by transport of larval provisions and nest construction, likely prerequisites for the evolution of eusociality. These two lineages are interpolated among three other clades of wasps whose species are predominantly ectoparasitoids on concealed hosts, the inferred ancestral condition for aculeates. This phylogeny provides a new framework for exploring the evolution of nesting, feeding, and social behavior within the stinging Hymenoptera."