Biological Sciences Blog

New class offering: Cancer Biology, BL4752, Spring 2016

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Cancer Biology imageNew class offering: Cancer Biology, BL4752, Spring 2016

• Do you know that cancer is the second leading cause of death?
• In 2013 alone, 14.9 million people had cancer & 8.2 million people died from cancer
• Do you know of anyone who has cancer?
• Are you interested in learning what causes cancer or the molecular changes that lead to cancer?

• Take BL 4752; learn about the biology of cancer with Dr. Tumban

• Course Objectives: Students will have an understanding of:
• the biological/non-­‐biological agents that cause cancer
• how these agents contribute to different cancers
• the molecular mechanism(s) leading to the disease
• how the circulatory and lymphatic systems affect the disease
• current treatment and therapeutic approaches

The prereqs are BL3012 Essential Cell Biology or BL4370 Cell Biology or BE2400 Cellular and Molecular Biology.

Cancer Biology Flyer

 

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UPDATED: Solving the Mystery That Connects MicroRNA and Proteins in the Pancreas

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Dr Tang’s research is featured this week on Michigan Tech’s home page.    

By Allison Mills MicroRNA strands were once thought of as junk genetic material. Now, researchers know that these small structures help program surrounding genes, affecting everything from eye color to cancer. For diabetes, one such connection is a classic whodunit—it was miR-483 with the SOCS3 protein in the pancreas. Unraveling this mystery is the subject of a new paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Pancreatic Cells

Xiaoqing Tang, one of the study co-authors and an assistant professor of biology at Michigan Technological University, is poised. She is as calm as you’d expect a sleuth to be, and she explains the complex interactions of pancreatic microRNA with the meticulousness of a crime scene investigator.

First, Tang says, we have to start with the big picture—the pancreatic cells where these genes interact.

“We’re interested in the alpha and beta cells,” says Tang, explaining that beta cells secrete insulin and alpha cells secrete glucagon, which regulate our blood sugar levels. A normal ratio is generally 80 percent beta cells and 15 percent alpha cells. “In type 2 diabetic patients, the ratio is imbalanced and we see beta cell loss and alpha cell expansion,” the researcher says.

Balancing these hormones is difficult to coordinate because several organs—the liver and brain as well as the pancreas—are involved. But the real nuance is within the alpha and beta cells themselves.

More at the University News site

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Updated – picture locations for Lake Superior Explorations BL5421

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Great Lakes Exploration

Updated with  a map LakeSuperiorExplore_photolocationsshowing the GPS locations for the pictures taken by Colin Brooks.  Each color represents a different day; each dot indicates the GPS location that Colin’s GPS linked camera recorded. They covered a lot of water!

 

See photos from the BL5421 course Lake Superior Explorations on the GLRC Flickr page.

Also see the list of YouTube videos including aboard the research vessel as well as underwater footage.

BL5421 Lake Superior Explorations for Graduate Students Summer 2015
Photos by Emil Groth and Colin Brooks
This is a field intensive Biological Sciences course at the Great Lakes Research Center at Michigan Technological University with significant time spent on research vessels (R/V Agassiz or NOAA R/V 5501) where students will learn the use of a variety of state-of-the-art techniques to characterize biological communities and measure important physical and biological processes.Instructors:Nancy A. Auer, Amy Marcarelli, Gary Fahnenstiel, Casey Huckins, (all Biological Sciences.) and Marty Auer (CEE) and Guy Meadows, Director of GLRC
.Explorations will take students to several Lake Superior environments, weather permitting, including the Ontonagon River, Huron and Keweenaw Bays and several sites along the western shoreline of the Keweenaw Peninsula. This voyage of discovery will target ecosystem processes, seeking signals of their presence along boundaries in time and space, including day/night sampling and over gradients found at the interface between tributaries and the open lake, along the major axis of embayments and across the coastal margin.Areas of coverage include: Collection of standard light, temperature, DO profiles, use of drogues/drifters to track current, Autonomous vehicle application, Sonar profiles, Primary production by microbes and algae, day and night comparisons of zooplankton, benthos and fish, and ROVs to observe these organisms, and standard PONAR and sediment collection.

 

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Updated: Durocher and colleagues publish two papers

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Congratulations to Dr. John Durocher and colleagues on their new publication:
 Recent PhD graduate Erich Petushek (CLS; MSU College of Human Medicine), Associate Professor Edward Cokely (CLS), Assistant Professor John Durocher (Bio Sci), Paul Ward (University of Huddersfield, UK), Sean Wallace (Illinois Institute of Technology), and Gregory Myer (Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center) published the paper “Injury Risk Estimation Expertise: Assessing the ACL Injury Risk Estimation Quiz,” in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 2015 43: 1640-1647. The Am J Sports Med is currently ranked 2 of 72 for Orthopedics and 3 of 81 for Sports Sciences based on Impact Factor. Here is a link to the article:http://ajs.sagepub.com/content/43/7/1640.full.pdf+html?sid=51b1fdd9-109c-4b1b-8346-5840921ed2a3
Assistant Professor John Durocher (Bio Sci), Professor Jason Carter (KIP), William Cooke (University of Texas at San Antonio), Angelea Young (Bio Sci & KIP), and Morton Harwood (Bio Sci) published a paper “Cerebral Blood Flow Velocity During Combined Lower Body Negative Pressure and Cognitive Stress,” in Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, Volume 86, Number 8, August 2015, pp. 688-692. Here is a link to the article abstract: http://michigantechmi.library.ingentaconnect.com/content/asma/amhp/2015/00000086/00000008/art00003
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Michigan Tech Experts Weigh in on Mine Remediation

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See the original Michigan Tech Article here

Released: 13-Aug-2015 1:05 PM EDT 
Source Newsroom: Michigan Technological University

Mine waste is dangerous to human and environmental health. The recent mine waste spill in Colorado is a stark reminder of that, but while details on the event may be sparse, the science behind remediation is not. Rupali Datta, an associate professor of biology at Michigan Tech, delves into how the heavy metals found in mine waste affect biological systems. She focuses on biochemistry and genetics to understand how metals are taken up by plants and animals–and how those metals are detoxed.

“The impacts from acid mine drainage affect the aquatic ecosystem mainly due to very low pH and high levels of bioavailable heavy metals,” Datta says, “Which can severely affect the biological community structure.”

Datta collaborates with Dibs Sarkar, a professor of environmental geochemistry in Montclair State University, New Jersey who is also an adjunct professor at Michigan Tech. They work on an abandoned coal mine site in Southern Illinois, testing the effectiveness of a “green” technology that they have developed to combat acid mine drainage problems in impacted water and soils. Sarkar says the spill is not a unique situation and could have been prevented.

“This was a totally avoidable situation,” he says. “It shouldn’t have happened with proper oversight, which unfortunately, is the case with many mine sites that produce acid mine drainage.”

Acid mine drainage is a routine problem in surface coal mines and metal mines, but are mostly not properly managed and the sites are abandoned. This current spill, which is from the Gold King Mine into the Animas River outside Durango, Colorado is getting media attention because of its scale, which is so vast that it would be difficult to fully gauge its impact on the environment right away. Long term impacts of the spill on the Animus River basin will need to be studied carefully. Datta and Sarkar do say the Environmental Protection Agency has taken quick steps to tackle the situation.

“However, their treatment process is generating a huge amount of solid waste in the form of contaminated sediments that they have to deal with down the road, and I hope, they will look for “green” methods instead of just dumping them in landfills,” Sarkar says.

Datta and Sarkar are available for comment on the Colorado spill to better put the event in the context of remediation science and long-term impacts of heavy metals.You can reach Rupali Datta at rupdatta@mtu.edu, office: 906-487-1783 and Dibs Sarkar atdsarkar1@mtu.edu, office: 973-655-7273

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