- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The new year hasn't begun, but already assistant professors Joanna Chiu and Brian Johnson are gearing up for the UC Davis Department of Entomology's winter seminar series, set Jan. 9-March 13.
All seminars will take place on Wednesdays from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison Drive and Kleiber Hall Drive. The seminars will be video-recorded and posted at a later date on UCTV. So, if you can't make it to the seminar in person, you can cozy up to your computer monitor at a later date.
They promise to be educational and informative.
Erin Wilson, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Louie Yang lab in the UC Davis Department of Entomology, leads off with her talk about "Effects of Omnivorous Invaders on Arthropod Communities in a Fragmented Landscape." She will zero in on those pesty rats (Rattus rattus) in Hawaii.
Wednesday, Jan. 9
Erin Wilson
Postdoctoral Associate, University of Maryland
Title: "Effects of Omnivorous Invaders on Arthropod Communities in a Fragmented Landscape"
Host: Louie Yang, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology
Wednesday, Jan. 16
Michael Branstetter (exit seminar)
Buck Postdoctoral Fellow, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Title: "Uncovering the Origins of a Middle American Ant Radiation: insights from Natural History, Biogeography and Molecular Data"
Host: Phil Ward, professor. UC Davis Department of Entomology
Wednesday, Jan. 23
Nick Haddad
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Biology, North Carolina State University
Title: "Landscape Conservation for Rare Insects"
Host: Neal Williams, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology
Wednesday, Jan. 30
Paul de Barro
Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO ecosystem sciences
Title: "Unravelling the Complex Bemisia tabaci (Silverleaf Whitefly): From Biotype to Species"
Host: Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the Department of Entomology
Wednesday, Feb. 6
Jim Cane
Entomologist, USDA-ARS Bee Biology Lab
Title: "Dietary Needs of Adult Solitary Bees: Consequences for Reproduction and Pollination"
Host: Leslie Saul-Gershanz, graduate student in the Neal Williams lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology
Wednesday, Feb. 13
Steven Reppert
Higgins Family Professor of Neuroscience, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Title: "Monarch Butterfly Migration: Behavior to Genes"
Hosts: Joanna Chiu, assistant professor, and Hugh Dingle, emeritus professor
Wednesday, Feb. 20
Nick Mills
Professor, UC Berkeley
Title: "Light Brown Apple Moth – Not a Typical Invader"
Host: Mary Louise Flint, entomology specialist and associate director for Urban and Community Integrated Pest Management (IPM), UC Statewide IPM Program
Wednesday, Feb. 27
Anupama Dahankar
Assistant Professor, UC Riverside
Title: "Taste Receptors and Feeding Preferences in Insects"
Host: Joanna Chiu, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology
Wednesday, March 6
Sergio Rasmann
Assistant Professor, University of Lausanne
Title: "Ecological, Evolutionary and Genetic Drivers of Plant Defenses against Herbivores"
Host: Rick Karban, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology
Wednesday, March 13
Anna Whitfield
Associate Professor, Kansas State University
Title: "Dissecting the Molecular Interplay Between Plant Viruses and their Arthropod Vectors"
Host: Diane Ullman, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology, and associate dean for undergraduate academic programs in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
So, there you have it--everything from ants, monarchs and the light brown apple moth to feeding preferences in insects.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Those are some of the topics to be covered at the UC Davis Department of Entomology's fall noonhour seminars, to begin Wednesday, Oct. 17 and continue through Wednesday, Nov. 28 in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Building.
Assistant professors Joanna Chiu and Brian Johnson of the UC Davis Department of Entomology are coordinating the fall noonhour seminars.
All seminars will be held every Wednesday except for Nov. 14. No seminar will be held that day. That's during the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting, which will take place Nov. 11-14 in Knoxville, Tenn.
The good news is that if you cannot attend these seminars, not to worry. Professor James R. Carey is arranging the videotaping of the seminars. They will be be broadcast at a later date on UCTV. Meanwhile, if you missed any of the previous ones, most can be accessed on UCTV.
For free.
Oct. 17: Tim Linksvayer, assistant professor, University of Pennsylvania.
Title: "Colony-Level Social Insect Gene Regulatory Networks"
Host: Brian Johnson, assistant professor of entomology
Oct. 24: Micky Eubanks, professor, Texas A&M University
Title: "Community Ecology of a "Pest": Aphids Rule their World via Powerful Indirect Effects"
Host: Graduate student Billy Kimmel
Oct. 31: Sarjeet Gill, professor, UC Riverside
Title: "Bacterial Toxins in Disease Mosquito Vector Control"
Host: Bruce Hammock, distinguished professor of entomology
Nov. 7: Taro Ohkawa, postdoctoral researcher, UC Berkeley
Title: "Baculovirus Manipulation of the Host Actin Cytoskeleton: Roles in Entry and Egress"
Host: George Kamita from the Bruce Hammock lab
Nov. 14: No seminar this week (Entomological Society of America's annual meeting)
Nov. 28: James Mallet, professor, Harvard University
Title: "Hybridization, Mimicry and the Origin of Species in Heliconius
Butterflies"
Host: Gregory Lanzaro, professor, UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine
The first speaker, evolutionary biologist Tim Linksvayer, will focus on superorganisms. Honey bees are considered superorganisms.
"Despite these conspicuous superorganismal properties and the inherent hierarchical organization of life in insect societies (i.e. colony-level, organismal-level), most previous studies of the evolutionary genetic and molecular basis of social insect traits use the same reductionist approaches that have been developed for solitary organisms, where an individual’s traits are only influenced by its own genome. More realistically, in social organisms, an individual’s traits are the property of the genomes of all social group members. I will discuss ongoing integrative research studying how social interactions in ants and honey bees affect the expression and evolution of individual- and group-level traits."
Stay tuned!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Assistant professors Louie Yang and Joanna Chiu have just announced the UC Davis Department of Entomology's list of seminar speakers for the winter quarter.
And what a list it is!
It's a winter wonderland of speakers. And the good news is, most will be webcast and then posted on UCTV, compliments of a project led by professor James R. Carey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
The seminars begin Wednesday, Jan. 11 and will continue every Wednesday through March 21. All will be held from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall, Klieber Hall Lane.
One subject that's sure to attract a lot of attention: pollen and pollinators. We're looking forward to hearing T’ai Roulston, research associate professor and curator, State Arboretum of Virginia, speak Feb. 1 on "Pollen as a Resource for Pollinators: What Governs Quality?"
In fact, we're looking forward to all of the speakers!
Here's the line-up:
Jan. 11: Denise Ferkey, assistant professor, State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, will speak on "Regulation of Chemosensory Signaling in C. elegans."
Hosts: Valerie Williamson, professor of nematology, and Ed Lewis, professor of nematology and entomology and acting chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.
Jan. 18: Anurag Agrawal, professor of ecology at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., will speak on "Evolutionary Ecology of Plant Defenses."
Host: Andrew Merwin of the Michael Parrella lab.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
Jan. 25: Mary Louise Flint, Cooperative Extension specialist and associate director for Urban and Community IPM, UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program, will speak on "Educating the Urban Public about Insect Pests and their Management."
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
Feb. 1: T’ai Roulston, research associate professor and curator, State Arboretum of Virginia, will speak on "Pollen as a Resource for Pollinators: What Governs Quality?"
Host: Neal Williams, assistant professor of entomology.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
Feb. 8: Damian Elias, assistant professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley, will speak on "Multimodal Communication in Jumping Spiders."
Host: Leslie Saul of the Neal Williams lab.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
Feb. 15: Jamesina J. Scott, district manager and research director, Lake County Vector Control District, will speak on "Aedes japonicus -- Tracking an Invasive Mosquito We Knew Very Little About."
Host: Brittany Mills of the William Reisen lab.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
Feb. 22: Jennifer Thaler, associate professor, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., will speak on "Tri-Trophic Plant-Insect Interactions in Solanaceous Plants."
Host: Billy Krimmel of the Jay Rosenheim lab
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
Feb. 29: Jay Rosenheim, professor of entomology at UC Davis, will speak on "Insect Ecology in Natural and Agricultural Systems."
Host: Kelly Hamby of the Frank Zalom lab.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
March 7: Candice Stafford, graduate student researcher in the Diane Ullman lab, will speak on "A Virus at the Helm: Infection with Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus Modifies Thrips Feeding Behavior."
Host: Diane Ullman, professor of entomology and associate dean for undergraduate academic programs in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
March 14: Ulrich Mueller, W. M. Wheeler Lost-Pines Professor of Integrative Biology, University of Texas, Austin, will speak on "Ant-Microbe Interaction and Evolution."
Host: Marek Borowiec of the Phil Ward lab.
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
March 21: Stephen Welter, professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley, and associate dean of instruction and student affairs, will speak on "Pheromone Mating Disruption Systems for Management of Insects in Perennial Crops: New Successes with Old Problems."
Host: Steve Seybold, UC Davis Department of Entomology affiliate
To be webcast and posted on UCTV
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's not just future entomologists who study insects. So do future physicians, veterinarians, chemists, ecologists and scores of others.
Indeed, insects are involved in many biological fields, including genetics and molecular biology; biochemistry and physiology; cell biology; population biology; behavior and ecology; biodiversity and evolutionary ecology; and agroecology.
At UC Davis, a trio from the Department of Entomology faculty wants to make a difference in college students' education. They've formed a campuswide Undergraduate Honors Research Program in Insect Biology to help undergraduates obtain long-term mentoring and research experiences.
Veteran professor Jay Rosenheim and newer faculty members Louie Yang and Joanna Chiu said they want 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. This will be useful for students whose career goals will take them to medical school, veterinary school, or graduate programs in any biological sub-discipline.”
UC Davis freshmen and sophomores interested in applying for the program must do so by May 15 by sending an email to Elvira Hack (eghack@ucdavis.edu). In a one-page letter, they will explain their motivation to join the program, and their special interests. Selected students will then be interviewed.
The gist of the program:
- During an initial academic retreat (at the Sagehen Creek Field Station in the Sierra Nevada mountains), faculty will instruct students about the process of science, approaches to choosing research questions, and the core elements of experimental design.
- Students will be placed in a faculty mentor’s laboratory. The goal: to find a strong match between the student’s research interests and the research focus of the mentoring faculty member’s lab.
- Students will be encouraged to take supporting coursework in insect biology (that is, general entomology, insect physiology, insect ecology) to provide the most relevant foundational information for conducting research in insect biology.
- For many participating students, it’s expected that there will be a natural transition from paid positions (when the students are contributing to a larger research effort) to course credits (when the students are pursuing their own independent research).
- Students will receive ongoing training and career guidance in conducting research, scientific writing, presentation of research results at professional scientific meetings, and all aspects of preparing applications for graduate or professional schools.
We applaud the work that Rosenheim, Yang and Chiu are doing, and the 30-some members of the mentoring faculty.
Rosenheim, who joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty in 1990, has long supported the academic and research needs of students. In fact, on May 11, he will receive a UC Davis Distinguished Teaching Award for Undergraduate Teaching. Faculty and students consider him "an extraordinary educator, a remarkable scholar and a superb teacher and mentor."
The ultimate compliment, however, came from an unsolicited comment on the web: “the best teacher at (UC) Davis. Hands down. Take him if you can.”
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you're suffering from a sleep disorder, then you'll want to know the kind of research that molecular geneticist Joanna Chiu of the UC Davis Department of Entomology is doing--with fruit flies.
The research may one day lead to alleviating your sleep disorder.
Chiu and two of her former colleagues at Rutgers just published groundbreaking research in the journal Cell. They identified a new mechanism that slows down or speeds up the internal clock of fruit flies.
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," said Chiu, an assistant professor of entomology.
"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."
Their work, involving the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The world of circadian clocks is a complex one. "Living organisms-plants, animals and even bacteria-have an internal clock or timer that helps them to determine the time of day," Chiu said. "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.
Read more about her research on the UC Davis Department of Entomology website.
The fruit fly, small in size--about 1/8th inch long--stands tall as a prized tool for genetic research and developmental studies.
Indeed, the red-eyed fly is a "golden bug.”