National Science Foundation Archives | Biological Sciences Blog

In Print – Thomas Werner Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology

Published July 24, 2024

Publication

Dr. Thomas Werner and a team of researchers recently published a paper in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology.

This team is comprised of Ph.D. students Adenike Olowolagba and Dilka Arachchige, Research Scientist Sushil Dwivedi (Chem), undergraduate students Ashlyn Colleen Beatty and Joseph Peters, high school students Crystal Wang and Alicia Guo, Associate Professor Thomas Werner (BioSci), and Associate Professor Rudy Luck and Professor Haiying Liu (both Chem).

The title of the paper is “Dynamic Insights into Mitochondrial Function: Monitoring Viscosity and SO2 Levels in Living Cells.”

This research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health, through Award Numbers 2R15GM114751 and R15GM114751 (Liu), and R15 GM146206-01 (Liu and Luck). The National Science Foundation also provided support through Award Number 2117318, which made it possible to purchase a new NMR spectrometer for the characterization of the chemical structures of the fluorescent probes, with Liu as a co-PI. High-performance computational calculations for the fluorescent probes were completed using the infrastructure at Michigan Tech.

About Thomas Werner

Very broadly defined, Dr. Thomas Werner is an entomologist who works on different biological questions in drosophilids (“fruit flies”) and lepidopterans (butterflies and moths). One quarter of his research has been published in the journals: Nature, Science, Cell, and PNAS. Werner has received more than $900,000 in total funding, most of which came from the NIH and NSF. He has research-mentored 107 undergraduate students and 7 graduate students. He was bestowed with the state-wide Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year Award 2021. Dr. Werner has also won Michigan Tech’s Distinguished Teaching Award twice (only three other faculty have won it twice in the history of Michigan Tech) for teaching Immunology, Genetics, Genomics, and Developmental Biology. He also discovered a new species of fruit fly, which he named after his student Tessa Steenwinkel, who won 9 research awards (e.g., the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Barry Goldwater Fellowship) and published 15 articles/books under Thomas’s mentorship. The species is called Amiota tessae. Furthermore, Dr. Werner is the founder of the open-access book series “The Encyclopedia of North American Drosophilids”, which serves the Drosophila research community, students, and teachers with currently three published volumes and nearly 10,000 worldwide downloads. These books transformed two campus libraries (U. of Rochester, NY and Michigan Tech) into open-access book publishers, promoting science and education at no cost.

About the Biological Sciences Department

Biological scientists at Michigan Technological University help students apply academic concepts to real-world issues: improving healthcare, conserving biodiversity, advancing agriculture, and unlocking the secrets of evolution and genetics. The Biological Sciences Department offers seven undergraduate degrees and three graduate degrees. Supercharge your biology skills to meet the demands of a technology-driven society at a flagship public research university powered by science, technology, engineering, and math. Graduate with the theoretical knowledge and practical experience needed to solve real-world problems and succeed in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business landscape.

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Amy Marcarelli Receives NSF Grant to Explore How Microbes Process Organic Matter in Streams

Published September 1, 2022

By Skylar LaPine

Funding
News

Professor Amy Marcarelli and a multi-disciplinary team have received a two-year, $300,000 NSF grant. The grant from the National Science Foundation is to study the relationships between organic matter and micro-organisms in streams.

Marcarelli and colleague in stream with five gallon bucket collecting a water sample — Marcarelli and colleague collecting water samples

An ecosystems ecologist, Marcarelli is leading a team of Michigan Tech ecosystem scientists, microbiologists, environmental chemists, and data scientists. The researchers are conducting detailed laboratory experiments to gather data on how microbial communities work together to process complex mixtures of dissolved organic matter in streams. Steve Techtmann, associate professor of Biological Sciences and an environmental microbiologist, is doing all the microbial work on the project in his lab at Michigan Tech.

Dissolved organic matter comprises many different kinds of molecules that come from terrestrial and aquatic plants and microbes. The researchers expect different microbes that live in streams to be specialized to break down these different molecules.

“We expect the relationships to be extremely complicated,” Marcarelli says.

They are looking at rates of respiration, carbon breakdown, and energy release. They hope to discover how the characteristics of dissolved organic matter and stream microbes can explain rates of carbon dioxide emission from streams.

The researchers will use the data to develop machine-learning models. “The relationships between the organic matter and micro-organisms might not be evident in simpler analysis methods,” Marcarelli explains.

The current work is the start of a much larger project. “We hope to build on the results of this project with a much bigger proposal for a large field project,” she says.

And why is this work important? “Although we, as a field, have studied carbon dioxide production and emission across many different streams, we can only predict a small amount of the variation we see based on environmental characteristics like temperature,” Marcarelli explains. “We think there is an important role of both microbes and organic matter structure that contributes to this variability, and understanding that is important for predicting these emissions in the future and response to global changes like climate and land use change.”

Marcarelli is the director of the Ecosystem Science Center at Michigan Tech.

This blog post initially appeared in the Fall 2022 Biological Sciences Newsletter. Read this article and others like it today.

Erika Hersch-Green Receives NSF CAREER Award

Published September 1, 2022

By Skylar LaPine

Erika Hersch-Green, plant evolutionary ecologist and associate professor of Biological Sciences, received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She will investigate how specific attributes of plants, such as their genome size, influence community biodiversity responses to increased nitrogen and phosphorus availability. Hersch-Green’s approach combines molecular, cytological, physiological, and phylogenetic techniques.

Hersch-Green is conducting her research on three fronts. First, she is currently gathering fresh data and merging it with information from experimental grassland sites around the world. These sites have plots with different nutrient treatments, allowing her to examine how response patterns vary depending on climate conditions. Second, she is conducting controlled greenhouse studies to better understand mechanisms that focus on two common grassland plants: fireweed and goldenrod, both of which she has studied before. Lastly, she developed a new research site at Churning Rapids, north of Hancock and south of McClain State Park. There she is extending her research to look at how disturbance patterns affect levels of biodiversity.

She is also exploring ways to improve students’ scientific literacy and engagement in research. To accomplish this, she is incorporating students in grades 6 through 12 and undergraduates in research, enhancing research involvement in the classroom, facilitating effective scientific communication skills of graduate students, and promoting collaboration among undergraduate students and faculty in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Humanities. These students will produce video content that will be used to enhance education and public understanding of biological science and ecology.

To summarize, Hersch-Green aims to provide a system-level understanding of how nutrient eutrophication—the increasingly dense growth of particular plants at the expense of other species—and landscape disturbances affect individual organisms and multi-species communities by looking at their interactions.

Although she is passionate about her research, Hersch-Green is also deeply committed to the educational component of her CAREER award. Her educational goals are to increase both scientific literacy and engagement of high school and university students on critical topics related to nutrient eutrophication, biodiversity, evolutionary adaptation, and awareness of related STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) career pathways.