Tag: Scientific Process

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On the RISE: Joshua and Caleb Marceau Use NIGMS Grant to Jump-Start Their Research Careers

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A college degree was far from the minds of Joshua and Caleb Marceau growing up on a small farm on the Flathead Indian Reservation in rural northwestern Montana. Their world centered on powwows, tending cattle and chicken, fishing in streams, and working the 20-acre ranch their parents own. Despite their innate love of learning and science, the idea of applying to and paying for college seemed out of reach. Then, opportunities provided through NIGMS, mentors, and scholarships led them from a local tribal college to advanced degrees in biomedical science. Today, both Joshua and Caleb are Ph.D.-level scientists working to improve public health through the study of viruses.

Joshua Discovers Unexpected Opportunities

Joshua Marceau examining a specimen in front of a large centrifuge.Joshua Marceau at Salish Kootenai College, where he gained research experience as an undergraduate. Credit: Joshua Marceau.

As the oldest of four brothers, Joshua was the trailblazer in the family. But like most trailblazers, his path to a scientific career wasn’t always smooth. He attended a reservation school until sixth grade, then was homeschooled. He earned his GED through the local tribal community college, Salish Kootenai College (SKC) in Pablo, so he could begin to take college-level chemistry.

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Get Kids Excited About Science: Free STEM Resources

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Cover of the graphic novel Occupied by Microbes!, showing four teens racing downhill on skateboards. Credit: University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

We have a new Science Education and Partnership Award (SEPA) webpage, featuring free, easy-to-access, SEPA-funded Link to external web site resources that educators nationwide can use to engage their students in science. The SEPA program supports innovative STEM Link to external web site and informal science education Link to external web site  projects for pre-kindergarten through grade 12. The program includes tools that teachers, scientists, and parents can use to excite kids about science and research, such as:

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Don’t Be Afraid to Search in the Dark: NIGMS Director Jon Lorsch Encourages College Grads to Consider New Perspectives

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Jon Lorsch, from Swarthmore College’s class of 1990, returned to his alma mater in May to accept an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree for his accomplishments as a biochemist and his visionary leadership of NIGMS. During the university’s 147th commencement, he spoke to the 2019 graduating class, offering advice and examples of how we can look for opportunities in the least likely places.

Watch the 5-minute video to hear Lorsch’s advice to the graduates—and all future scientists—to venture into the unknown in search of the next big advance in biomedical research.

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On Pi Day, Computational Biologists Share What They Love About Math

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Another cool fact about Pi: The mirror reflection of the numbers 3 1 4 spells out P I E.

Why do math lovers around the world call March 14 “Pi Day”? Because Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is 3.14. Pi is a Greek letter (π) that represents a constant in math: All circles have the same Pi, regardless of their size. Pi has been calculated out to as many as 1 trillion digits past the decimal, and it can continue forever without repetition or pattern.

In honor of Pi Day, we asked several biomedical researchers in the field of computational biology to tell us why they love math and how they use it in their research. Continue reading “On Pi Day, Computational Biologists Share What They Love About Math”

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Another Piece to a Century-Old Evolutionary Puzzle

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After mating about 55,000 pairs of fruit flies and sifting through 333,000 daughter flies, a research team found six sons that each had mutations in the same gene that helped make two fruit fly species unique from each other. Credit: Jim Woolace, Fred Hutch News Service.

Nitin Phadnis and Harmit Malik set out to conduct an experiment that could solve a century-old evolutionary puzzle: How did two related fruit fly species arise from one? Years after they began their quest, they finally have an answer.

The existence of a gene that helps make each of these fruit fly species unique and separate from each other had been guessed at since 1940, following experiments decades earlier in which geneticists first noticed that the two types of flies, when mated, had only daughters—no sons.

Scientists had previously discovered two other genes involved in driving the fruit fly species apart, but they knew those two genes weren’t the full story.

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New Views on What the Cell’s Parts Can Do

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Studying some of the most well-tread territory in science can turn up surprising new findings. Take, for example, the cell. You may have read in textbooks how the cell’s parts look and function during important biological processes like cellular movement and division. You may have even built models of the cell out of gelatin or clay. But scientists continue to learn new facts that require those textbooks to be updated, and those models to be reshaped. Here are a few examples.

Nuclear Envelope: More Than a Protective Barrier

Damaged heterochromatin represented by nucleotides GCAT
Damaged heterochromatin, a tightly packed form of DNA, travels to the inner wall of the nuclear envelope for repair. Credit: Irene Chiolo and Taehyun Ryu, University of Southern California.

Like a security guard checking IDs at the door, the nuclear envelope forms a protective barrier around the cell’s nucleus, only letting specific proteins and chemical signals pass through. Scientists recently found that this envelope may also act as a repair center for broken strands of heterochromatin, a tightly packed form of DNA.

Irene Chiolo of the University of Southern California and Gary Karpen of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were part of a team that learned that healthy fruit fly cells mend breaks in heterochromatin by moving the damaged DNA strands to the inner wall of the nuclear envelope. There, proteins embedded in the envelope make the necessary repairs in a safe place where the broken DNA can’t accidentally get fused to the wrong chromosome. Continue reading “New Views on What the Cell’s Parts Can Do”

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Four Ways Inheritance Is More Complex Than Mendel Knew

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Original edition of Gregor Mendel’s 1866 publication, Experiments in Plant Hybridization
An original edition of Gregor Mendel’s 1866 publication, “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” housed in NIH’s National Library of Medicine. Credit: Alisa Machalek.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Gregor Mendel’s publication that—after sitting ignored for a few decades—helped launch the field of modern genetics. Mendel didn’t know about DNA. But after painstakingly cross-fertilizing tens of thousands of pea plants over the course of 8 years, this Austrian monk came very close to describing genes.

By picking a species with a handful of visible characteristics that occur in two easily identifiable forms, Mendel was able to pinpoint what he called “factors.” These factors determine traits like a pea’s shape or color, for instance, and are passed down from parents to offspring. He also observed that factors can be dominant or recessive.

Today, we know that inheritance is far more complex than what Mendel saw in his pea plants. Here are some of the things scientists have learned about how traits are passed from one generation to the next. Continue reading “Four Ways Inheritance Is More Complex Than Mendel Knew”

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Bacterial Biofilms: A Charged Environment

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Bacillus subtilis biofilm
A Bacillus subtilis biofilm grown in a Petri dish. Credit: Süel Lab, UCSD.

Last summer, we shared findings from Gürol Süel Exit icon and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, that bacterial cells in tight-knit microbial communities called biofilms expand in a stop-and-go pattern. The researchers concluded that this pattern helps make food at the nutrient-rich margin available to the cells in the starved center, but they didn’t know how. They’ve now shown that the cells use electrochemical signaling to communicate and cooperate with each other.

Because nutrients and other signals cells use to sense each other and their environment move rather slowly, the researchers looked for a faster, more active communication system in biofilms of the bacterium B. subtilis. They focused on electrical signaling via potassium, a positively charged ion that, for example, our nerve and muscle cells use to send or receive signals. Continue reading “Bacterial Biofilms: A Charged Environment”

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Seeing Telomerase’s ‘Whiskers’ and ‘Toes’

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Telomerase and its components.

The image here is the “front view” of telomerase, with the enzyme’s components shown in greater detail than ever before. Credit: UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Like the features of a cat in a dark alley, those of an important enzyme called telomerase have been elusive. Using a combination of imaging techniques, a research team led by Juli Feigon Exit icon of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now captured the clearest view ever of the enzyme.

Telomerase maintains the DNA at the ends of our chromosomes, known as telomeres, which act like the plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces. In the absence of telomerase activity, telomeres get shorter each time our cells divide. Eventually, the telomeres become so short that the cells stop dividing or die. On the other hand, cells with abnormally high levels of telomerase activity can constantly rebuild their protective chromosomal caps. Telomerase is particularly active within cancer cells. Continue reading “Seeing Telomerase’s ‘Whiskers’ and ‘Toes’”

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Sharing ‘Behind the Scene’ Stories About Scientific Discoveries

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a video worth? For cell biologist Ron Vale, it’s priceless.

Screen shot from the video
In this iBiology Exit icon “discovery talk,” Ron Vale describes the twists and turns that led him to unexpected findings, including a motor protein involved in important cellular processes.

In 2006, Vale started a video-based science outreach project called iBiology Exit icon to give people around the world broader access to research seminars. The free online videos, which cover a range of biomedical fields and career-related topics, take viewers behind the scenes of scientific findings and convey the excitement of the discovery process.

While geared mostly for undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, the videos are also a rich resource for anyone who wants a better understanding of many biomedical areas, including those we cover on this blog. Continue reading “Sharing ‘Behind the Scene’ Stories About Scientific Discoveries”