WUSTL Science & Technology News

High school students gets hands-on view of engineering

2013-06-11 00:00:00

Joe Angeles (2)

More than 30 local high school juniors and seniors were on campus June 6 for the third annual Explore Engineering day, sponsored by the School of Engineering & Applied Science. The community outreach event allows students to work with WUSTL engineering faculty and students and get hands-on experience in engineering projects to promote critical thinking. Above, from left, teammates Jeremy Wotjak, Tia-Lynn Rounsoville and Dasha Malkova attempt to pick up a ring and place it on a pole as part of the prosthetic hand project, which students assembled from Popsicle sticks, a cup and other everyday items. Below, from left, teammates Suraj Puvvada, Mark Blumenfeld, Trenton Mayes and Chris Cormier work on a JAVA program that allowed students to build virtual robots and battle each other. Jordyn Maglalang (standing), doctoral student in computer science & engineering, helps Mayes with a question. Students also were able to build and test a wind turbine.

Scientists map the wiring of the biological clock

Diana Lutz — 2013-06-05 00:00:00

This famous still of Harold Lloyd in the 1923 film Safety Last epitomizes the plight of modern human beings, equipped with biological clocks designed to adjust to gentle seasonal changes in daylight, but unable to make the brusque changes militated by mechanical clocks, shift work, travel across time zones and artificial lights.

The World Health Organization lists shift work as a potential carcinogen, says Erik Herzog, PhD, Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. And that’s just one example among many of the troubles we cause ourselves when we override the biological clocks in our brains and pay attention instead to the mechanical clocks on our wrists.

In the June 5 issue of Neuron, Herzog and his colleagues report the discovery of a crucial part of the biological clock: the wiring that sets its accuracy to within a few minutes out of the 1440 minutes per day. This wiring uses the neurotransmitter, GABA, to connect the individual cells of the biological clock in a fast network that changes strength with time of day.

Daily rhythms of sleep and metabolism are driven by a biological clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a structure in the brain made up of 20,000 neurons, all of which can keep daily (circadian) time individually.

If the SCN is to be a robust, but sensitive, timing system, the neurons must synchronize precisely with one another and adjust their rhythms to those of the environment.

Herzog’s lab has discovered a push-pull system in the SCN that does both. In 2005 they reported that the neurons in the clock network communicate by means of a neuropeptide (VIP) that pushes them to synchronize with one another.

And, as they now report in Neuron, these neurons also communicate with GABA that pulls on them weakly, so they are not too tightly coupled.

Together these two networks (VIP and GABA) ensure the clock runs as coordinated, precise timepiece but one that can still adjust its timing to synchronize with the environment.

“We think the neurotransmitter network is there to introduce enough jitter into the system to allow the neurons to resynchronize when environmental cues change, as they do with the seasons,” Herzog says.

But, he says, since this biological ‘reset button’ evolved long before mechanical clocks, artificial lights, and high-speed travel, it doesn’t introduce enough jitter to allow us to adjust quickly to the extreme time shifts of modern life, such as flying “backward” (east) through several time zones.

Understanding the push-pull system in the SCN has enormous implications for public health, bearing, as it does, on daylight saving times, shift work, school starting times, medical intern schedules, truck driver hours, and many other issues where the clock in the brain is pitted against the clock in the hand.

Synchronizing the cellular clocks
The “clock” inside each SCN neuron depends on the cyclic expression of a family of genes such as the Period (PER) genes. The expression of these genes and the neuron’s firing rate typically peak at mid-day and fall at night. The gene activity is like the cogs in a clock, and the electrical activity like the hands on the clock.

Each neuron in the SCN keeps time, but because they’re different cells, they have slightly different rhythms. Some run a little bit fast and others a bit slow. If the SCN as a whole is to function as a clock, its neurons need to synchronize with one another.

NIH

A wrench for the Brain Activity Map toolkit?

Ever since President Barack Obama announced a new initiative to map all the functional connections in the human brain, scientists have been worrying out loud that we may not yet have tools up to the task. After all, the brain has more than a billion neurons that make more than a trillion connections.

Herzog says the technique used in his lab to study the biological clock might be useful for the Brain Activity Map as well. By recording neuronal activity, researchers can look for correlated changes between cells. When neuron 1 increases its firing, neuron 2 might be excited and increase its firing.

The problem is knowing if that increase was a coincidence or a consequence. The technique, called BSAC (Between Sample Analysis of Connectivity) reliably reveals functional connections by first describing the statistics of impossible connections. If the two neurons are in different dishes, they cannot communicate so the increased firing of neuron 2 must have been a coincidence.

By recording from lots of neurons in independent networks, BSAC defines the weakest possible connections that can be detected within a neural network. This could be useful in mapping connections between pairs of neurons or between brain regions.

The goal of the recent work in the Herzog lab has been to figure out how the clock cells are connected to each other. “It wasn’t clear, for example, if each neuron communicated with just a few of its neighbors or with all of them,” Herzog says.

Mark Freeman, a graduate student in the lab, developed a method for recording the firing rate of about 100 neurons simultanously on a multi-electrode array. “You float the SCN neurons down gently,” Herzog says, “and the neurons will attach to the electrodes, creating a clock in a dish that will tick away for weeks or months.”

Using these electrode arrays, his lab demonstrated that the neurons in the SCN are synchronized by the exchange of the neuropeptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide), which alters the expression of PER to speed up or slow down neurons until they are all in synch.

These synchronized networks are very precise, says Herzog. If you let them free-run in constant darkness they will lose or gain only a few minutes out of the 1,440 minutes in a day. So they’re accurate to within 1 or 2 percent.

But they’re ever so slightly off the 24-hour cycle tied to one turn of the planet on its axis. Over time they would drift far enough off that cycle to be of little use to us, unless they also had some means of synchronizing to local time.

http://youtu.be/kqFc4wriBvE

Herzog points out that the neurons in the SCN are coupled oscillators, like these metronomes on a table that has enough give that each metronome’s motion affects the others’. Like the metronomes, the neurons keep time individually and because they are coupled by the VIP network, they synchronize their beats. Video by the Ikeguchi Laboratory, in the graduate school of science and engineering at Saitama University in Japan. (You might want to turn down the sound before watching it.)

Resetting the cellular clocks
In the article published in Neuron, Herzog and his colleagues report on a second network in the biological clock.

In this network the connections are made by the neurotransmitter GABA (γ-amino-butyric acid). “We proved we had found a GABAergic network by applying drugs that block GABA receptors on the cells,” Herzog says. “All of the connections we had mapped between neurons dropped out.”

Remarkably, when the network drops out, the clock becomes more precise. So the GABAergic network destabilizes the clock; it jiggles it a little.

Herzog points out that the GABAergic network, is sparse, weak and fast (much faster than the VIP network, which relies on the slower action of a neuropeptide), as you might expect a jitter-generator to be.

“We think the GABAergic network is there to let our clocks adjust to environmental cues, such as gradual, seasonal changes in sunrise and sunset,” says Herzog.

It’s a bit like whacking an old television set that has lost vertical synch to get it to resynch with the broadcast signal.

But there isn’t enough jitter in the clock to allow it to make abrupt adjustments, such as the one-hour forward jump when Daylight Savings Time starts. That “spring forward” has been statistically shown to increase the likelihood of heart attacks and car accidents, Herzog says.

Some sleep aids, such as benzodiazepines, that activate the GABA receptors may make the circadian clock a little more jittery, helping people adjust to big time jumps, such as flying across time zones. “But we don’t yet know whether they can improve jetlag; if they do, we want to know if it is because they help you sleep on the long flight or because they help the biological clock adjust to the new time zone,” Herzog cautions.

In any case, it is clear that if people repeatedly force the clock to reset, they throw off more than sleep. The biological clock regulates metabolism and cell division as well as sleep/wake cycles. So shift work, for example, is associated both with metabolic disorders, such as diabetes, and with the unregulated cell division that characterizes cancer.

Fighting our biological clocks does a lot more than make us crabby coffee drinkers.

To hear Erik Herzog talking about his research go to the podcast "Circadian rhythms" on WUSTL's Hold that Thought.

Peters to receive Spirit of St. Louis Medal

Beth Miller — 2013-06-05 00:00:00

David A. Peters, PhD, McDonnell Douglas Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has been selected to

David A. Peters

receive the 2013 Spirit of St. Louis Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineering for his service in the advancement of aeronautics and astronautics.

The award is given annually to one individual who has shown “outstanding foundational contributions to the development of accurate and tractable models that underlie the design and safety of helicopters, and the computational implementation of these algorithms in flight simulators used worldwide; and for fundamental contributions to modern helicopter design.”

Peters will receive the award Nov. 18 at the ASME Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition in San Diego.

For more information, go to engineering.wustl.edu/newsstory.aspx?news=7425.

Wrighton to speak in Denver June 13 on innovation and entrepreneurship

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-06-05 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton will speak in Denver June 13 about the critical role research universities play in creating positive economic growth.

Mark S. Wrighton

"Innovation and Entrepreneurship: How Research Universities Foster
Economic Development" is free and open to the public.

The talk will take place at 8 a.m. Thursday, June 13, at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science Ricketson Auditorium. Registration and breakfast begin at 7:30 a.m.

The event is presented by Washington University in St. Louis in partnership with the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce.

For more than a half century research universities in America, including
Washington University, have contributed to economic advances. Many of these advances stem from the large federal investment in science, engineering, and biomedical research. But success in a region also depends on building an "ecosystem" for development of new enterprises.

“Innovation and entrepreneurship are key to economic growth surrounding a research university,” Wrighton says. “Innovators and entrepreneurs can be encouraged and supported at research universities through proactive engagement with the regional ecosystem, and through advanced educational programs like the Executive MBA degree program at Washington University.”

This September, Washington University will begin offering its top tier 20-month Executive MBA program in Denver. For more information on the Denver EMBA program, visit news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/24966.aspx.

For more information on Wrighton’s talk, call (303) 820-EMBA.

Older adult clumsiness linked to brain changes

Gerry Everding — 2013-06-04 00:00:00

For many older adults, the aging process seems to go hand in hand with an annoying increase in clumsiness — difficulties dialing a phone, fumbling with keys in a lock or knocking over the occasional wine glass while reaching for a salt shaker.

While it’s easy to see these failings as a normal consequence of age-related breakdowns in agility, vision and other physical abilities, new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that some of these day-to-day reaching and grasping difficulties may becaused by changes in the mental frame of reference that older adults use to visualize nearby objects.

“Reference frames help determine what in our environment we will pay attention to and they can affect how we interact with objects, such as controls for a car or dishes on a table,” said study co-author Richard Abrams, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences.

Abrams

“Our study shows that in addition to physical and perceptual changes, difficulties in interaction may also be caused by changes in how older adults mentally represent the objects near them.”

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, is co-authored by two recent graduates of the psychology graduate program at Washington University. The lead author, Emily K. Bloesch, PhD, is now a postdoctoral teaching associate at Central Michigan University. The third co-author, Christopher C. Davoli, PhD, is a postdoctoral psychology researcher at the University of Notre Dame.

When tested on a series of simple tasks involving hand movements, young people in this study adopted an attentional reference frame centered on the hand, while older study participants adopted a reference frame centered on the body.

Bloesch

Young adults, the researchers explain, have been shown to use an “action-centered” reference frame that is sensitive to the movements they are making. So, when young people move their hands to pick up an object, they remain aware of and sensitive to potential obstacles along the movement path. Older adults, on the other hand, tend to devote more attention to objects that are closer to their bodies — whether they are on the action path or not.

“We showed in our paper that older adults do not use an ‘action-centered’ reference frame. Instead, they use a ‘body-centered’ one,” Bloesch said. “As a result, they might be less able to effectively adjust their reaching movements to avoid obstacles — and that’s why they might knock over the wine glass after reaching for the salt shaker.”

Davoli

These findings mesh well with other research that has documented age-related physical declines in several areas of the brain that are responsible for hand-eye coordination. Older adults exhibit volumetric declines in the parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus, as well as white-matter loss in the parietal lobe and precuneus. These declines may make the use of an action-centered reference frame difficult or impossible.

“These three areas are highly involved in visually guided hand actions like reaching and grasping and in creating attentional reference frames that are used to guide such actions. These neurological changes in older adults suggest that their representations of the space around them may be compromised relative to those of young adults and that, consequently, young and older adults might encode and attend to near-body space in fundamentally different ways,” the study finds.

As the U.S. population ages, research on these issues is becoming increasingly important. An estimated 60 to 70 percent of the elderly population reports difficulty with daily living activities, such as eating and bathing, and many show deficiencies in performing goal-directed hand movements. Knowing more about these aging-related changes in spatial representation, the researchers suggest, may eventually inspire options for skills training and other therapies to help seniors compensate for the cognitive declines that influence hand-eye coordination

This research is supported by Grant AG0030 from the National Institute on Aging.

Singamaneni to develop new biosensors with NSF CAREER Award

Beth Miller — 2013-06-03 00:00:00

Biomedical sensors using metal nanoparticles hold great promise for the early detection of disease. But the current class of sensors has little or no shelf life, and creating and using them is expensive.

Srikanth Singamaneni

Srikanth Singamaneni, PhD, assistant professor of materials science in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, plans to develop a low-cost biosensor that is more stable, sensitive and specific with funds from a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award he has received from the National Science Foundation.

The prestigious awards support junior faculty who model the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Singamaneni, who focuses on biomedical applications of plasmonic nanostructures, is the 19th faculty member from the School of Engineering & Applied Science to receive a CAREER award since 1996.

With the five-year, $400,000 award, Singamaneni plans to create a novel class of biosensors based on self-assembled clusters of metal nanoparticles that have been imprinted with artificial antibodies specific to target biomarkers, which can be indicators of disease. The goal of the work is twofold: to clarify the nature of artificial antibody-antigen interactions, which will enable him and his team to devise new methods to identify monoclonal artificial antibodies that are highly specific to the target biochemical substances; and to design and fabricate self-assembled, hierarchical metal nanoparticle cluster arrays, which will serve as highly sensitive optical sensors and integrate artificial antibodies with such plasmonic nanocluster arrays.

“We intend to gain some fundamental understanding of how these artificial antibody interactions are happening,” he says. “In particular, we are interested in identifying the physical and chemical factors that dictate the selectivity of the artificial antibodies. We’re hoping that these experiments will help us to improve the specificity and sensitivity of these sensors we’re trying to build.”

Most of the previous work related to plasmonic biosensors is based on natural antibodies as target recognition elements. While these sensors are very sensitive and offer great promise for point-of-care diagnostics, natural antibodies have a short shelf life and are expensive and time-consuming to develop and apply. Addressing these issues, Singamaneni and the team used artificial antibodies to create the plasmonic biosensors. Artificial antibodies have been fabricated by a method called surface molecular imprinting.

This process involves attaching the target proteins to the surface of gold nanorods, then adding small molecules around the proteins to form a polymer layer around the outside of the nanorods. The target proteins are removed to leave cavities on the surface of the nanorods. When the nanorods with the artificial antibodies are exposed to a substance, such as urine, that contains the target protein, those proteins settle into the cavities. These antibodies are polyclonal antibodies, which can bind to a nanoparticle in any orientation.

In the new work funded by the CAREER award, Singamaneni plans to use a similar process, but this time use polyhistidine-tagged proteins to ensure that the artificial antibodies will bind to the nanoparticle in a very precise orientation, similar to a puzzle piece fitting into a jigsaw puzzle. This process would create monoclonal antibodies, or very specific antibodies designed to target a specific recognition site of the target protein.

“If we are successful, this will be the first time anyone has created monoclonal artificial antibodies on plasmonic nanostructures,” Singamaneni says.

In addition, Singamaneni plans to study the binding interaction between the artificial antibodies and antigens at the molecular level using a technique called surface force spectroscopy.

“Our previous work of fabricating artificial antibodies directly on plasmonic nanostructures was a pioneering work – we were the first to do it,” Singamaneni says. “That’s why with this new class of sensors, we need to understand the basic science associated with it. We are trying to go after the unknowns so that the fundamental understanding that we gain through this project is applicable to almost any kind of protein-artificial antibody combination.”

In another part of the project, Singamaneni plans to invite one or two high-school science teachers to spend a summer working in his lab to be immersed in nanotechnology. At the end of the two summers, Singamaneni, the teachers, and representatives of the university’s Institute for School Partnership will formulate a curriculum to teach nanotechnology in Kindergarten through 12th grade.

“We are also hoping to develop a nanotechnology kit that we can market nationwide,” he says. “Students would be able to work with nanoparticles in solutions with different pH so that they will see changes in colors. This will prompt discussion and get them interested in nanotechnology.”
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The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 82 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 700 graduate students and more than 23,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

MEDIA ADVISORY: Explore Engineering to give high school students a taste of the field

2013-05-30 00:00:00

Who: About 30 area high school rising juniors and seniors interested in science, technology, math and engineering

What: Explore Engineering, a daylong event sponsored by Washington University School of Engineering & Applied Science.

The community outreach event allows students to work with Washington University Engineering faculty and students and get hands-on experience in engineering projects to promote critical thinking.

Students will creating a prosthetic hand from funnels, Popsicle sticks and other everyday items, build a wind turbine and use computer programming software to build robots that battle each other.

Participants also will find out about what it takes to get a degree in engineering, what it’s like to be an engineering student and what kinds of careers are available.

Where: Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering & Applied Science classrooms

When: Thursday, June 6, 2013

Interview/Photo opportunities: Students and faculty will be available for interviews and photographs during the hands-on activities between 9:30-11 a.m.; 12:40-2:10 p.m.; and 3-4:30 p.m.

Background: Explore Engineering, now in its third year, focuses on students who like math and science but may not be exposed to engineers through school, family or friends. The goal at the end of the day is to give students an experience that confirms to them what an engineer is and does and shows them the opportunities an engineering degree presents.

Deadly infections cut in sickest hospital patients

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-29 00:00:00

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In hospital intensive care units, bathing patients daily with an antimicrobial soap and applying antibiotic ointment in the nose reduced by 44 percent bloodstream infections caused by dangerous pathogens, including the drug-resistant bacteria MRSA (above).

A major study in hospital intensive care units shows that bathing patients daily with an antimicrobial soap and applying antibiotic ointment in the nose reduced by 44 percent the bloodstream infections caused by dangerous pathogens, including the drug-resistant bacteria MRSA.

The effort to remove potentially harmful bacteria from ICUs also lowered by 37 percent the number of patients who harbored MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) on their bodies. These patients were not sick from the bacteria but were at risk for MRSA infections and spreading the germ to other patients.

The study’s findings are published online May 29 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the University of California at Irvine, Harvard Pilgrim Health, Hospital Corporation of America and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were involved in the study.

Hospitals must be continually on guard to prevent infections that occur in patients during their stays. These infections can spread quickly, and the sickest patients are most at risk. While vigilant hand washing among hospital staff is critical, many infections also occur from bacteria in patients’ noses and on their skin.

The research involved nearly 75,000 patients who were treated at 43 hospitals, all owned by the Hospital Corporation of America. Infectious diseases physician Victoria Fraser, MD, head of Washington University’s Department of Medicine, helped design and oversee the study.

“The results of this study are very important,” said Fraser, also the Adolphus Busch Professor of Medicine. “The risks of acquiring health-care-associated infections and multidrug-resistant organisms among critically ill patients remain a significant challenge. This study demonstrates new and cost-effective methods to protect patients and improve outcomes in ICUs.”

MRSA is resistant to first-line antibiotic treatments and is a significant cause of illness and sometimes death, especially among patients receiving medical care. In hospital ICUs, 75 percent of MRSA infections are considered resistant to commonly used antibiotics.

Of the strategies tested for reducing MRSA infections, the one that proved most effective was arguably the simplest and most straightforward. Rather than screening patients in intensive care units for MRSA and isolating or treating only the carriers, all ICU patients were bathed daily using a soap treated with an antiseptic (chlorhexidine), and all received an antibiotic ointment (mupirocin) applied in the nose for five days.

At Barnes-Jewish Hospital, which was not part of the study, all ICU patients already are bathed daily with the chlorhexidine soap. That routine practice was implemented in 2009 after a study by Fraser and her colleagues showed that the antiseptic soap reduced hospital-associated infections by 25 percent among patients in the medical and surgical ICUs at Barnes-Jewish.

Mupirocin ointment is not used routinely in Barnes-Jewish ICUs or in most other hospital ICUs. There are a small number of bacteria that are already resistant to the antibiotic in the ointment and some concerns about whether broad use of mupirocin in ICUs could speed antibiotic resistance.

“Based on the new data, we’ll evaluate whether to incorporate mupirocin into routine use in our ICUs,” said David Warren, MD, medical director for infection prevention at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. “If we use the ointment, we will closely monitor for antibiotic resistance.”

In ICUs, antibiotic-resistant bacteria that usually live harmlessly on the body cause many infections. These infections can cause serious complications for patients, increasing the duration of their hospital stays, driving up costs and raising the risk of death. To address the problem, some states have mandated MRSA screening by hospitals, but experts in the field have questioned whether other measures would be more effective.

As part of the study, patients in ICUs were randomly assigned to one of three approaches for reducing MRSA infections. Patients in the first group were screened for MRSA and isolated if they were found to be carrying the bacteria.

Those in the second group were similarly screened and carriers were isolated, but they also were bathed daily with chlorhexidine soap and received nasal mupirocin ointment for five days to help remove MRSA from the body. All ICU patients in the third group, regardless of whether they harbored MRSA on their bodies, received daily chlorhexidine baths and five days of mupirocin.

The third strategy, known as universal decolonization, was the most effective and the easiest to implement; it also eliminates the need for screening ICU patients for MRSA.

“Overall, the results are very encouraging and provocative,” Warren said. “The results potentially could be applied to many critically ill patients in ICUs throughout the country to reduce the incidence of dangerous infections.”_________________________________________________

The research was funded by the Healthcare-Associated Infections Program (HHSA290201000008I) from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) program, and the Prevention Epicenters Program (1U01 CI000344) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Huang SS, Septimus ES, Kleinman K, Moody J, Hickok J, Avery TR, Lankiewicz J, Gombosev A, Terpstra L, Hartford F, Hayden MK, Jernigan JA, Weinstein RA, Fraser VJ, Haffenreffer K, Cui E, Kaganov RE, Lolans K, Perlin JB, Platt R. Targeted versus universal decolonization to prevent ICU infection. The New England Journal of Medicine. May 29, 2013.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Gordon to be honored for microbiome studies

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-06-04 00:00:00

Jeffrey I. Gordon, MD, director of the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has been named the 2013 recipient of the Robert Koch Award. The award is widely regarded as the leading international prize in microbiology.

Gordon, also the Dr. Robert J. Glaser Distinguished University Professor, is being honored for his pioneering studies of the body’s trillions of microbes and their role in health and disease. His explorations of gut microbial communities have laid the foundation for new research to understand how microbes and their genes, collectively known as the microbiome, shape many aspects of human physiology, metabolism and immunity.

Gordon

Gordon's award includes a prize of 100,000 euros and is a recognition of the significant impact microbiome research is having on the field of microbiology and, more broadly, on research in the biological sciences.

“The Koch award is a well-deserved honor for Jeff and a timely recognition of his role in founding the field of human microbiome research,” said Larry J. Shapiro, MD, executive vice chancellor of medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine. “His studies have changed our view of 'self' and of human development, health and disease, and opened the door to new possibilities for 21st-century medicine.”

Much of what is known about the workings of the gut microbiome has come from Gordon’s seminal studies of identical and fraternal twins and of “gnotobiotic” mice – germ-free mice that had been raised under sterile conditions and then colonized with human microbes and fed human diets.

He and his team have developed powerful new computational and experimental approaches to characterize the collection of microbes living in the gut and to define the role of microbial genes in extracting nutrients and calories from the diet, synthesizing vitamins and nutrients, and helping to shape the immune system. This work can help scientists design foods of the future that provide added nutritional benefits to consumers.

In the past decade, Gordon’s research has uncovered a compelling link between the microbiome and obesity and, more recently, his studies have implicated a dysfunctional gut microbiome as an underlying cause of childhood malnutrition.

Earlier this year, the contributions of Gordon and his students to microbiome research were recognized by the National Academy of Sciences with the Selman A. Waksman award. Last year, he received the 2012 Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Gordon will be presented with the Koch Award at a November ceremony at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Germany. He will be honored with Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who will receive the Robert Koch Gold Medal, a lifetime achievement award from the Koch Foundation. Fauci is being recognized for his research in the field of immune regulation and AIDS.

Both honors are named after German scientist Robert Koch, who is considered one of the founders of the field of microbiology. Koch discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905.

Gordon has served on the School of Medicine faculty for more than 30 years and mentored almost 120 PhD and MD/PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a medical degree from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.

University will anchor new CORTEX building

Diane Duke Williams — 2013-06-05 00:00:00

Robert Boston

A hard-hat tour May 16 highlighted construction at 4240 Duncan Ave., a former telephone factory being converted by Wexford Science & Technology into a laboratory and research facility in the CORTEX bioscience district. The university will be the anchor tenant in the building, renamed @4240.

Washington University in St. Louis will be the anchor tenant in a $73 million laboratory and research facility projected to open at the end of the year in the CORTEX bioscience district.

The conversion of this facility, a former telephone factory at 4240 Duncan Ave., kicks off phase two of the CORTEX district. The building, recently renamed @4240, is being renovated by Wexford Science & Technology, a national research park developer in Baltimore.

Wexford collaborates with universities, research institutions and health-care systems to build environments that integrate academic, corporate and entrepreneurial research and development. The company has developed eight other similar facilities in the United States.

CORTEX, a nonprofit organization, is a collaboration of Washington University, Saint Louis University, BJC Healthcare, the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Its goal is to develop a 187-acre Central West End area into one of the nation’s leading research districts.

Robert Boston

Pictured are (from left): John P. Dubinsky, chairman of CORTEX; Dan Cramer, executive vice president of Wexford Science & Technology; Mayor Francis Slay; Hank Webber, Washington University's executive vice chancellor for administration; and Dougan Sherwood, director of Cambridge Innovation Center. The group participated in a tour of the newly renamed @4240 building.

The first phase of CORTEX created 950 jobs, and the second phase is expected to generate 1,400 more, according to Dennis Lower, CORTEX’s president and chief executive officer. He said the organization projects its efforts will create more than 11,000 office and research jobs in the next 25 years.

Several operating units of Washington University’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research will have a prominent presence in the building. The Office of Technology Management (OTM) will occupy an innovative, creative space in the old factory’s garage area on the first floor. The offices of Sponsored Research Services, Research Administration and Research Ethics and Compliance will be together in a second collaborative space.

Evan D. Kharasch, MD, PhD, vice chancellor for research, is excited about the @4240 project. “My teams are presently located in more than six separate locations, across several campuses of the university,” he said. “By moving to @4240, we will be located together for the first time, affording opportunities for better integration and service to faculty and creative new models for the university’s research infrastructure.”

Kharasch said that by moving into CORTEX, OTM is making an affirmative statement that it wants the university’s commercialization efforts in the heart of St. Louis’ biomedical research innovation center. “This gives us an optimal opportunity to commercialize university research technology and gives our students and trainees a sense of place and access to engage creatively with our industry, business and venture capital colleagues and partners,” he said.

Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) in Boston, one of the nation’s leading business and innovation incubators, will establish a start-up facility on the second floor of the building. This is CIC’s first innovation center outside of Boston.

Additionally, the School of Medicine’s Physicians Billing Service, Health Information Release Services and Streamline Referral group will be on the third floor of @4240.

Hank Webber, executive vice chancellor for administration, agrees that the university will see numerous benefits from its significant role in the @4240 building. “Our faculty, students and staff want to live in an economically vibrant region, and this building is expected to create about 450 high-tech jobs,” he said. “Our faculty and students also want to work in a region where they can commercialize their discoveries. CORTEX and CIC are a big part of the increasingly successful effort to make St. Louis a center for research commercialization.”

The renovations will meet the needs of research, biotechnology, innovation and science-based tenants. The design will maximize natural light by using large, industrial windows to provide daylight in all labs and offices. HOK is the project’s architect.

Wexford will register @4240 with the highest possible LEED certification based on significant restoration to the historical building and many sustainable design features, including energy-recovery ventilation, permeable pavements and high-performance windows.

The main entrance of @4240 will be moved from Duncan to Boyle Avenue to face the new CORTEX commons, a park-like space that will serve as a hub of the entire CORTEX district. The commons will include a landscaped plaza, and the CORTEX district soon will begin work on new streets, sidewalks, trees, lighting and public safety enhancements.

Focus on renewable energy

2013-05-22 00:00:00

Sid Hastings

Robert Blankenship, PhD (second from right), professor of chemistry and biology in Arts & Sciences and director of WUSTL's Photosynthetic Antenna Research Center (PARC), poses for a photograph recently with this year's recipients of the Certificate in Renewable Energy and the Environment, sponsored by PARC and the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability. The students who completed the program are (from left) Lucas Harrington, a May graduate in chemistry in Arts & Sciences; Michael Gidding, a May graduate in the Master of Business Adminstration program at Olin Business School and the Master of Engineering program in the School of Engineering & Applied Science; and Michael Yue, a May graduate in environmental earth sciences in Arts & Sciences. The certificate provides an opportunity for students to pursue interdisciplinary energy studies in addition to their major. The program combines academic courses, outreach interaction, hands-on research experience and networking opportunities.

Engineering professor gets Gates Foundation grant for work in global health

Beth Miller — 2013-05-21 00:00:00

Washington University in St. Louis announced that it is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tae Seok Moon, PhD, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project titled “Programmed Killing of Parasite Eggs by Probiotic Organisms.”

Tae Seok Moon

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Moon’s project is one of the Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 grants announced May 21 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

To receive funding, Moon and other Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in critical global heath and development topic areas that included agriculture development, neglected tropical diseases and communications. Applications for the next round will be accepted starting September 2013.

Moon’s project addresses parasite infection in people in developing countries. While there are drugs to help kill parasite worms and eggs in the body, there is no long-term strategy to prevent disease transmission. Moon has proposed to engineer probiotic bacteria that would be added to donated foods, reproduce in the intestine where parasite eggs are produced, and come out of the body with the eggs in waste.

The probiotic bacteria contain a genetic circuit, or a computer, which distinguishes the outside conditions from those in the human body. Once the bacteria come out of the human body with the eggs, the genetic circuit triggers a “suicide bomb,” killing the parasite eggs and the bacteria in the process, eliminating any potential harm to humans or to the environment.

Moon, who joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in July 2012, directs his research toward creating programmable cells that process multiple input signals and produce desirable outputs for real-world applications. An expert in the design and construction of genetic circuits, he aims to build synthetic gene circuits to control and improve cellular processes.

Combining his research experiences with more than five years of experience in the biotechnology industry, he envisions his career as transforming biology research from an “observation” approach to a “synthesis-based engineering” activity to address energy, environment and health issues.

About Grand Challenges Explorations

Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, 800-plus people in more than 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 120 full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 700 graduate students and more than 19,000 alumni, it is working to leveragepartnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.

Better detection for elephantiasis worm infection

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-20 00:00:00

Washington University School of Medicine

Washington University's Kurt Curtis, in Liberia, readies a new diagnostic test for lymphatic filariasis, a mosquito-borne infection that can lead to enormously swollen limbs and genitals. The new test detected the infection in many people that the standard test had missed.

A new diagnostic test for a worm infection that can lead to severe enlargement and deformities of the legs and genitals is far more sensitive than the currently used test, according to results of a field study in Liberia, in West Africa, where the infection is endemic.

The new test found evidence of the infection – lymphatic filariasis – in many more people that the standard test had missed.

The study, the first to independently evaluate the new test, was led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The infection affects 120 million people living in 73 countries, leaving some 40 million profoundly disfigured and incapacitated. Both tests detect the presence of worms that cause lymphatic filariasis, a devastating mosquito-borne illness also known as elephantiasis.

But the new test has significant advantages over the test that has been used for more than a decade not only to diagnose the disease, but to map, monitor and evaluate the success of a massive global public health program aimed at completely eliminating the disease by 2020.

Results of the study are published May 20 in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

“The older test has had a major impact, but the new one is even better,” says lead author Gary J. Weil, MD, an infectious diseases specialist at Washington University School of Medine. “Annually, medication to treat and prevent the infection is distributed to more than 500 million people worldwide. The improved sensitivity of the new test will help determine whether the mass treatment program has been effective and also identify regions that need additional attention.”

An accompanying editorial by Maria Rebollo, MD, and Moses Bockarie, PhD, at the Centre for Neglected Tropical Diseases in the United Kingdom says the new diagnostic test “represents a major breakthrough for rapid diagnosis of lymphatic filariasis in the blood.”

The new test also has a longer shelf life, estimated at two years without refrigeration, compared with three months for the older version, and is expected to cost less.

Weil’s research team worked with colleagues at the Liberian Institute for Medical Research to conduct a side-by-side comparison of the new test strip and the currently used test. They evaluated the tests in 503 people ranging in age from 6 to 89.

Both versions of the test are manufactured by Alere Scarborough Inc. of Maine and detect the presence in the blood of a protein produced by the worm parasite Wuchereria bancrofti that causes lymphatic filariasis. The new test is performed by pricking the finger and placing a person’s blood onto the test strip, which looks similar to an over-the-counter pregnancy test. Like many pregnancy tests, the lymphatic filariasis test is positive if two lines appear in the test window and negative if only one line shows.

The study's results show that the new test is highly sensitive, detecting nearly 26 percent more infections of lymphatic filariasis than the standard test (124/503 infections vs. 98/503 infections). The new test also was easier to perform and results were easier to read.

“This gives us some indication of the numbers of infections we were missing with the older test,” Weil says. “On a global scale, it’s a huge number of cases. We need to have an accurate test to be sure we are reaching all the people who have the disease or are at risk of developing it.”

Worldwide, some 1.4 billion people are at risk of lymphatic filariasis, which is endemic in many countries in Africa, Southeast Asia and other tropical regions. Worm larvae deposited by the bite of an infected mosquito enter the body and migrate to the lymphatic system, where they mature into adult worms.

The thread-like parasitic worms can live and reproduce in the body for years. Ultimately, this damages the lymphatic vessels that drain fluid from the tissues and causes the enormous swelling and disabling deformity of the legs and in males, the scrotum.

Weil has been active for years in efforts to eliminate lymphatic filariasis via mass drug administration, an approach that involves giving antifilarial drugs to everyone in areas with high infection rates. Organizers of the Global Programme to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis, launched in 2000, coordinate periodic, repeated mass drug administration of antifilarial medications to more than 500 million people annually, making it the world’s largest public health intervention program based on mass drug administration.

The research is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Weil GJ, Curtis KC, Fischer K, Majewski AC, Fischer PU, Fakoli L, Gankpala L, Bolay FK, Lammie P, Pelletreau S and Won KY. Laboratory and field evaluation of a new rapid test for detecting Wuchereria bancrofti antigen in human blood. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. May 20, 2013.

Bear Cub grants foster entrepreneurship

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-16 00:00:00

Joe Angeles

Jung-Tsung Shen, PhD, is one of five WUSTL scientists recently awarded a Bear Cub grant. Shen is developing a photonic switch, pictured on his computer screen, that is much faster, smaller and more energy efficient than other switches now used to support broadband communications.

Scientists are natural problem solvers, full of innovative ideas. But moving those ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace can be difficult, even for those with an entrepreneurial bent.

In part, that’s because federal research dollars typically don’t support the proof-of-concept studies needed to demonstrate the feasibility of a promising new technology or diagnostic test. And while most scientists feel right at home in the laboratory, they often struggle to develop a successful pitch or execute a business plan.

To fill the gap, Washington University’s Bear Cub program provides university scientists with funding to help commercialize their discoveries. Beginning this year, scientists who are funded through the program also have access to business mentors and other hands-on assistance to develop their technologies.

“We want our faculty and students to have every opportunity to commercialize their technologies,” says Bradley Castanho, PhD, director of the university’s Office of Technology Management. “Part of that means creating an atmosphere where scientists are supported and encouraged in their efforts to become entrepreneurs, while also helping to make funding available so they can move their discoveries beyond the lab.”

The university recently announced a new round of Bear Cub funding, with $204,000 going to five scientists:

David Beebe, PhD, the Janet and Bernard Becker Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, is developing a way to prevent the formation of cataracts in patients undergoing retinal surgery. To repair the retina, surgeons must remove a portion of the vitreous gel that fills the eye, a process that exposes the lens to oxygen and increases the likelihood of cataracts.

Working with colleagues at Purdue University who developed a novel biological polymer, Beebe will evaluate whether the polymer can preserve the remaining vitreous gel and restore its properties to prevent cataracts from forming. He is now proposing to test the polymer in animal models, with the goal of developing a sterile synthetic polymer powder that could be mixed with sterile saline and infused into the eye at the end of retina surgery. Annually, some 300,000 patients in the U.S. alone could benefit from the technology, the researchers have estimated.

Joseph Gaut, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology, has developed a test for the early detection of acute kidney injury, a complication that can occur in critically ill patients and in those undergoing heart bypass surgery. Some 700,000 U.S. patients undergo heart bypass surgery every year, and one-fourth of them develop kidney damage, which leads to longer hospital stays and deaths, in some cases.

The test developed by Gaut and his colleagues is based on a kidney-specific protein that is elevated in the blood soon after acute kidney damage occurs, typically several days before currently available tests. The researchers will evaluate whether the protein can accurately diagnose early kidney damage in animal models and in heart bypass patients, which would enable earlier treatment.

Michael S. Hughes, PhD, research associate professor of medicine, is working with John E. McCarthy, PhD, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Mathematics, and Samuel A. Wickline, MD, professor of medicine, to develop an imaging technology that captures certain aspects of electromagnetic and acoustic waves and converts that information into an image.

Rather than being based on wave energy, however, the image measures the entropy, or disorder, in an object and can detect features that are not picked up by ultrasound, CT scans and other conventional imaging. Entropy imaging could potentially have wide applications in medicine and be used to identify defects in materials used by the aerospace and other transportation industries or in heavy manufacturing. Another possible application is in security scanning to detect potential threats and in remote surveillance.

Eric Leuthardt, MD, associate professor of neurological surgery, has designed a monitor to noninvasively detect obstructions in vascular grafts and shunts. The monitor uses a nanoscale flow sensor that can be integrated into an implantable shunt or graft. Both can narrow over time and become obstructed, leading to life-threatening complications.

For example, about one in 500 babies is born with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid on the brain. It is most often treated surgically by inserting a shunt that diverts the fluid to another area of the body. But symptoms of pain in the head, even something like a headache, can lead doctors to order CT scans, nuclear medicine studies and sometimes exploratory surgery to determine whether the pain is related to an obstruction.

The sensor Leuthardt has developed can be activated by light to measure the flow rate of fluids through grafts and shunts, and he plans to test the device in animal models.

Jung-Tsung Shen, PhD, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering, has developed a photonic switch that is orders of magnitude faster, smaller and more energy efficient than other switches typically used to support the information superhighway. In the future, demands for broadband signal transmission and processing will require ultra-fast and extremely low-energy optical switching and modulation rates that aren’t possible with current approaches.

The switch designed by Shen and his colleagues uses artificially engineered materials, called metamaterials, that exhibit exceptional optical properties not easily observed in nature. In addition to telecommunications, the switch also could be used in high-resolution medical imaging and in semiconductor manufacturing. Bear Cub funding will allow Shen to further develop and test the switch.

Apollo 17 astronaut visits WUSTL for week of events related to lunar exploration

2013-05-16 00:00:00

NASA

Schmitt, shown here in his official NASA photograph taken in 1971, will visit Washington University in St. Louis the week of May 20.

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist and Apollo 17 astronaut, will be visiting Washington University in St. Louis for a week of activities centered on lunar exploration.

On Monday, May 20, Schmitt will give a seminar titled “Field Geology on Another World: Perspectives From the Taurus-Littrow Valley, Moon.” The talk, which beings at 2 p.m. in Room 201 Crow Hall, is free and open to the public.

Schmitt was on board the last Apollo mission to the moon, Apollo 17, which left Earth Dec. 7, 1972, to land near the southeastern edge of Mare Serenitatis in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow.

Schmitt writes: “For 75 hours, Gene Cernan and I lived and worked in the valley, performing extensive geological studies of the volcanic rocks that partially fill the valley, the boulders that rolled into the valley from the surrounding mountains, and the meteor impact generated soils that cover the valley floor and walls.

“Successful exploration of Taurus-Littrow capped a six-mission investigation of the materials and history of the moon. At the conclusion of these studies, science had gained a first order understanding of the evolution of the moon as a planet.”

Exploration forum with students

After the seminar, Schmitt then will participate in an “exploration forum,” an informal gathering of students to discuss the future of human space exploration, especially what should or could be done differently next time there is a manned mission to the moon. Students from earth and planetary sciences and physics in Arts & Sciences will participate, as will the WUSTL RASC-AL team.

The RASC-AL team is a group of WUSTL undergraduate and graduate students who entered a NASA-sponsored competition called Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts-Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) this year. In this competition, students are asked to develop concepts that may provide solutions to design challenges human space exploration currently faces.

The WUSTL team proposed investigating potential landing sites for a lunar outpost at the moon’s South Pole, from which astronauts could test areas in permanent shadow for volatile compounds that would not have survived exposure to sunlight elsewhere on the moon. The evidence of these volatiles and the geological characterization of this unexplored moon region might answer longstanding questions about the moon and its origins.

The team has reached the competition’s second round and will travel to Cocoa Beach, Fla., in June to present its proposal to a panel of NASA, Boeing and other industry judges. The exploration forum will give the team a chance to rehearse aspects of the presentation it will later make at the RASC-AL forum.

An eclectic mix of students in engineering, business administration, earth and planetary science, environmental earth science and medicine, the RASC-AL team is advised by Ramesh Agarwal, PhD, the William Palm Professor of Engineering mechanical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Review meeting

Tuesday through Thursday, Schmitt will participate in a science team meeting for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Cameras (LROC), hosted by Brad Jolliff, PhD, the Scott Rudolph Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences.

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying in a low orbit over the moon, has taken many images that show the traces of manned missions. This is the Apollo 17 landing site, where astronauts Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Gene Cernan deployed the final Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). The trails the astronauts took to either side are still visible, as is the final parking place of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a spacecraft launched in 2009 that is currently orbiting the moon in a low orbit that passes over the poles. Its purpose is to prepare for future missions to the moon by making detailed maps of its surface that can be used to identify safe landing sites and potential resources and characterize the radiation environment.

The LRO camera’s principal investigator is Mark Robinson, PhD, professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University. The LROC team includes distinguished space scientists from U.S. universities, the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Münster in Germany.

At the meeting, the team will discuss spacecraft and camera operations, spacecraft observations (volcanic, tectonic and impact features), future operations, future targets and image processing.

Vote for students' project in NSF competition

2013-05-16 00:00:00

WUSTL’s Melanie Bauer, a graduate student in psychology, and Eric Hamilton, a graduate student in plant biology, both in Arts & Sciences, are competing in a National Science Foundation essay contest, the Innovation in Graduate Education Challenge.

Bauer and Hamilton propose a new required graduate course to teach students, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM fields, the skills to communicate their work and its relevance to the general public. The idea is to improve public discourse and to give students skills for alternative career paths.

The public can vote online through May 29. To support Bauer and Hamilton’s project for the Community Choice award, and to learn more about their idea, visit here.

Bauer and Hamilton worked together after meeting at Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), held at WUSTL this spring. Both committed to working on projects dealing with science outreach and communication. To learn more about the students’ efforts and WUSTL’s leadership in key CGI U areas, visit here.

WUSTL alumna selected as a 2013 National Geographic Emerging Explorer

2013-05-15 00:00:00

Lance Hayashida/California Institute of Technology

Ehlmann

Bethany Ehlmann, who graduated from WUSTL in 2004 with a bachelor's degree in earth and planetary science, joins a roboticist, an astrobiologist, a glaciologist, an artist and an entrepreneur as one of 17 visionary, young trailblazers from around the world who have been selected as this year’s National Geographic Emerging Explorers.

National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers Program recognizes and supports uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists and innovators who are at the forefront of discovery, adventure and global problem-solving while still early in their careers. Each Emerging Explorer receives a $10,000 award to assist with research and to aid further exploration.

The new Emerging Explorers are introduced in the June 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine, and comprehensive profiles can be found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/emerging

“As National Geographic celebrates its 125th anniversary year and looks forward to embracing a new age of exploration, we look to our Emerging Explorers to be leaders in pushing the boundaries of discovery and innovation. They represent tomorrow’s Robert Ballards, Jacques Cousteaus and Jane Goodalls,” said Terry Garcia, National Geographic’s executive vice president for Mission Programs.

After earning her bachelor's at WUSTL, Elhmann continued her studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. She earned a PhD from Brown University in 2010. She now conducts research on how weathering processes have changed the surface of Mars and other terrestrial planets as a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, both in Pasadena, where Curiosity’s mission control is headquartered.

In her current role as a participating scientist with the Curiosity mission, Ehlmann is using the rover’s Chemistry and Camera instrument, known as “ChemCam,” to remotely fire a laser that will blow holes in rocks and create clouds of atoms that indicate the chemical composition of the rocks.

As Ehlmann told the The Chronicle of Higher Education in a recent news article, this is the first time anyone has zapped rocks with lasers on another planet. The laser, she says, will vaporize a patch of the Mars surface, creating a plasma. Light emitted from the plasma forms a “fingerprint” based on the particular atoms that make up the rock. By looking at the ratios of these elements, researchers may be able to determine whether the rocks were formed by upwelling groundwater or by settling sediments in a lake.

“"It would be a grand-slam home run." Ehlmann says,"if we find enhanced carbonates, particularly organic carbon, because that could tell us that Mars might even have been inhabited long, long ago. But there’s a lot of ifs to that, and we’re still a long way away from it.”

Morris receives top Alzheimer’s Association honor

Michael C. Purdy — 2013-05-15 00:00:00

Washington University neurologist John C. Morris, MD, received the Alzheimer’s Association’s Medical and Scientific Award for 2013.

Morris

Morris, the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (Knight ADRC), was recognized for his many contributions to Alzheimer’s research and treatment at the association’s annual Rita Hayworth Gala in Chicago May 11.

The gala is named in honor of actress Rita Hayworth, who died of Alzheimer’s disease. The actress’s daughter, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, started the tradition of the galas in 1984, and they have raised more than $59 million for Alzheimer’s research.

“We’ve had a long and highly valued relationship with the Alzheimer’s Association,” Morris said. “Receiving this award was a moving and very meaningful honor for me and all of my colleagues at the Knight ADRC.”

Among other accomplishments, Morris’ research team refined the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) system, which was first developed by the founding director of the Alzheimer’s center, Leonard Berg, MD. The CDR now is the standard clinical measure for staging of dementia. Morris’ studies have helped clinicians better distinguish between the normal effects of aging on memory and the earliest clinical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

Over the course of his career, Morris has helped guide the formation of a new consensus that Alzheimer’s disease actively damages patients’ brains for a decade or more before mental functions become noticeably impaired. Morris, Joseph L. Price, PhD, DPhil, professor of anatomy and neurobiology, and others at the ADRC contributed significantly to this consensus through a series of studies that revealed widespread brain damage in patients only recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

This insight led scientists to conclude that treating Alzheimer’s disease prior to cognitive impairment might significantly improve the chances of slowing or stopping the breakdown of normal brain function. Morris and his colleagues at the Knight ADRC have been frontrunners in the development of biomarkers, or factors that can be tested to identify the presence of presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease.

“I accept this award on behalf of the investigators, staff, and participants and their families of the Knight ADRC, who together are responsible for the accomplishments this award recognizes,” Morris said.

In 2008, the National Institute on Aging named Morris as principal investigator of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network (DIAN), an international collaboration of Alzheimer’s research centers. DIAN allowed researchers to validate Alzheimer’s biomarkers in patients with rare inherited forms of the disease.

Based on the groundwork laid by Morris, researchers now are testing preclinical treatment of inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease in a second international research collaborative, the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network Trials Unit, which is led by Randall Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor in Neurology at Washington University.

Washington University teams each win $50,000 Arch Grants in startup competition

Beth Miller and Melody Walker — 2013-05-14 00:00:00

Four startup companies with ties to Washington University in St. Louis have received $50,000 each in the Arch Grants 2013 Global Startup Competition designed to stimulate and support the early-stage entrepreneurial community in St. Louis.

The winning companies are: Sparo Labs, a medical device company founded by two engineering undergraduate students; Juristat, a software company that targets litigators and founded by three alumni; LipoSpectrum LLC, a life science company providing R&D labs with advanced biological lipid-analysis co-founded by an Olin Business School Executive MBA alumnus; and MMBiosensing LLC, which invented a new method of detecting the bio-markers of heart attack and founded by a WUSTL postdoctoral research associate.

The companies were among 20 companies chosen from 40 finalists, trimmed from more than 700 entrants, vying for the $50,000 grants of unrestricted funds. The grants also come with networking and mentoring opportunities and other free services, including legal, accounting, marketing, cloud computing and mentoring support.

Recipients also get access to St. Louis’ angel investment network, the opportunity to be a part of the downtown St. Louis startup community and an opportunity for a $100,000 follow-on grant from Arch Grants.

The win is the latest in a string of awards for Sparo Labs, headed by Andrew Brimer and Abigail Cohen, who are both graduating May 17 from the School of Engineering & Applied Science with bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, respectively.

In April, the team won $25,000 in the engineering school’s inaugural Discovery Competition. In February, the team won $30,000 in the 2013 Olin Cup Competition sponsored by the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. Last summer, the team won first place in two national engineering competitions, resulting in $15,000 in prizes.

Brimer and Cohen have spent nearly two years developing the product and a prototype that empowers patients to quantitatively track and proactively manage asthma, cystic fibrosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and other respiratory diseases via seamless integration with smartphones, tablets and computers — ultimately implementing low-cost diagnostic and monitoring spirometry worldwide.

Most spirometers cost between $1,000-$2,000, making them unaffordable for hospitals and clinics in the developing world. However, the Sparo Labs device costs about $8. The low cost could allow health-care providers in developing countries to purchase the spirometers, which are specially designed for accuracy and durability despite their price.

Sparo Labs has filed for a patent and is preparing the product for clinical trials and FDA approval.

Juristat collects electronic lawsuit case data from state and federal court databases. The company uses a proprietary system to index this data into a single dynamic searchable database. Its product can provide more than 150 unique pieces of litigation intelligence, such as the probability of success on motions and appeal or metrics of an attorney’s experience within a practice area or specific court. Users can then quickly search and produce predictive models allowing lawyers to design the best litigation and marketing strategies.

Juristat was co-founded by CEO Drew Winship, JD, formerly a trial lawyer for the Brown & James law firm and an alumnus of Washington University School of Law; Robert Ward, a developer for Beck Automation; and Jordan Woerndle, an analyst for the Neuroinformatics Research Group at the School of Medicine and an alumnus of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. Kent Syverud, JD, dean of Washington University School of Law, is on the advisory board for Juristat.

LipoSpectrum LLC co-founder and CEO Milind Sant, with a doctorate in organic chemistry and an executive MBA from Olin Business School, is employing patented technology developed at Washington University in this bioscience company. The technology, called Multi Dimensional Mass Spectrometry Shotgun Lipidomics (MDMS-SL), provides enhanced, state-of-the-art lipid analysis from biological samples of all types, including plants, animals and humans. Many fields can benefit from detailed molecular level lipid analysis, including cardiovascular, diabetes, obesity, cancer, autoimmune and neurological diseases, nutrition, agriculture and bio-fuel (algae).

MMBiosensing LLC, founded by Amos Danielli, a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Lihong Wang, PhD, in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has invented and patented a proprietary method of detecting the biomarkers of a heart attack with significantly higher sensitivity and greatly reduced testing time compared to competitors. The company is developing the technology into a point-of-care device that will greatly reduce emergency room wait times and costs to patients and providers, and improve patient outcomes. The company also won $50,000 in the 2013 Olin Cup competition.

The company’s leadership staff – Abu Abraham, Robbie Garrison, and F. Gabriel Santa Cruz – are all graduates of the Olin Business School.

I-CARES announces 2013 funded research projects

2013-05-14 00:00:00

The International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) has announced the award winners for its 2013 Call for Proposals.

As part of its mission, I-CARES awards seed funding to WUSTL faculty undertaking innovative and collaborative research in the broad areas of renewable energy and sustainability through an annual call for proposals.

This year, special emphasis was placed on projects related to climate change.

I-CARES has awarded 12 projects with 25 Washington University faculty from five schools: Arts & Sciences, the Brown School, the School of Engineering & Applied Science, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the School of Medicine.

For a full list of winning projects and the faculty members involved, visit here.

I-CARES supports a network of national and international researchers, all with a focus on renewable energy, the environment and sustainability, extending beyond WUSTL’s seven schools.

With the addition of the 2013 research awardees, I-CARES now supports 99 individual researchers across 71 projects.

Alzheimer’s markers predict start of mental decline

Michael C. Purdy — 2013-05-13 00:00:00

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have helped identify many of the biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease that could potentially predict which patients will develop the disorder later in life. Now, studying spinal fluid samples and health data from 201 research participants at the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, the researchers have shown the markers are accurate predictors of Alzheimer’s years before symptoms develop.

Roe

“We wanted to see if one marker was better than the other in predicting which of our participants would get cognitive impairment and when they would get it,” said Catherine Roe, PhD, research assistant professor of neurology. “We found no differences in the accuracy of the biomarkers."

The study, supported in part by the National Institute on Aging, appears in Neurology.

The researchers evaluated markers such as the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain, newly visible thanks to an imaging agent developed in the last decade; levels of various proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid, such as the amyloid fragments that are the principal ingredient of brain plaques; and the ratios of one protein to another in the cerebrospinal fluid, such as different forms of the brain cell structural protein tau.

The markers were studied in volunteers whose ages ranged from 45 to 88. On average, the data available on study participants spanned four years, with the longest recorded over 7.5 years.

The researchers found that all of the markers were equally good at identifying subjects who were likely to develop cognitive problems and at predicting how soon they would become noticeably impaired.

Next, the scientists paired the biomarkers data with demographic information, testing to see if sex, age, race, education and other factors could improve their predictions.

“Sex, age and race all helped to predict who would develop cognitive impairment,” Roe said. “Older participants, men and African Americans were more likely to become cognitively impaired than those who were younger, female and Caucasian.”

Roe described the findings as providing more evidence that scientists can detect Alzheimer’s disease years before memory loss and cognitive decline become apparent.

“We can better predict future cognitive impairment when we combine biomarkers with patient characteristics,” she said. “Knowing how accurate biomarkers are is important if we are going to some day be able to treat Alzheimer’s before symptoms and slow or prevent the disease.”

Clinical trials are already under way at Washington University and elsewhere to determine if treatments prior to symptoms can prevent or delay inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease. Reliable biomarkers for Alzheimer’s should one day make it possible to test the most successful treatments in the much more common sporadic forms of Alzheimer’s.

Funding for this study was provided by the Longer Life Foundation; the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (P30 NS057105); the National Institute on Aging (P50 AG005681, P01 AG003991, and P01 AG026276); Fred Simmons and Olga Mohan, and the Charles and Joanne Knight Alzheimer’s Research Initiative of the Washington University Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Roe CM, Fagan AM, Grant EA, et. al. Amyloid imaging and CSF biomarkers in predicting cognitive impairment up to 7.5 years later. Neurology, DOI 10.1212/WNL.0b013e3182918ca6

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Supreme Court decision closes loophole in Monsanto’s business model

2013-05-13 00:00:00

The Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Bowman v. Monsanto holds that farmers who lawfully obtain Monsanto’s patented, genetically modified soybeans do not have a right to plant those soybeans and grow a new crop of soybeans without Monsanto’s permission. “The Court closed a potential loophole in Monsanto’s long-standing business model, prevents Monsanto’s customers from setting up ‘farm-factories’ for producing soybeans that could be sold in competition with Monsanto’s soybeans, and it enables Monsanto to continue to earn a reasonable profit on its patented technology,” says Kevin Collins, JD, patent law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis

Collins

Collins’ comments on the loophole in Monsanto’s business model and the legal controversy with the Bowman v. Monsanto decision follow:

Soybean loophole

Monsanto invented a genetically modified soybean that is resistant to a particular herbicide, glyphosate. This agricultural technology poses an unusual challenge for Monsanto insofar as Monsanto seeks to use patent protection to profit from its invention.

Unlike most technologies, soybeans are to some extent self-replicating: the process of planting genetically modified soybeans leads to the creation of more genetically modified soybeans which, if planted, can generate yet more genetically modified soybeans, etc. To profit from farmers’ use of the patented soybeans year after year, Monsanto must prevent farmers from saving the soybeans harvested from a first crop and replanting them as a second crop.

In large part, Monsanto achieves this goal by requiring farmers who purchase the patented soybeans from Monsanto to sign a technology licensing agreement that contractually forbids the farmers from saving and replanting the harvested soybeans in future growing seasons. However, this contractual solution leaves a loophole that Bowman sought to exploit. Farmers who have signed the technology agreement regularly sell their soybean crops to a grain elevator that, in turn, regularly sells the soybeans for human or animal consumption.

Bowman went to a grain elevator, purchased Monsanto’s genetically modified soybeans, and planted them in his fields. Bowman was not under any contractual obligation to Monsanto; he did not sign a technology licensing agreement when he purchased the soybeans. He therefore argued that he had the right to re-plant the soybeans he purchased and to grow a new crop. This is the potential loophole in Monsanto’s ability to prevent the saving and replanting of its patented soybeans that the Supreme Court closed in Bowman v. Monsanto.

Legal controversy

More technically, the legal controversy in Bowman arises from the convergence of the unusual technological capacity of patented soybeans to self-replicate when planted and the patent doctrine of exhaustion.

The exhaustion doctrine states that an unrestricted sale of a patented article exhausts the patentee’s rights with respect to that article.

When a consumer buys a patented good—say, a vacuum cleaner—in an over-the-counter transaction, the consumer may use the vacuum cleaner for its intended purpose of cleaning without infringing the patent. However, the exhaustion doctrine is limited in that the purchase of the vacuum cleaner does not give the patent owner the right to make a second vacuum cleaner.

This limit on the exhaustion doctrine is an intuitive one: it is necessary for a patent owner to continue to earn a profit on a patented technology throughout the full term of a patent.

Bowman’s argument hinges on the fact that the clean distinction between a normally exhausted right to use a patented good for its intended purpose and a normally not-exhausted right to make new patented goods collapses when the patented technology is a self-replicating soybean.

The normal and ordinary way in which a farmer uses a soybean (planting it) necessarily makes new soybeans (the harvested crop). Bowman argued that his right to use the purchased soybeans therefore entailed a right to make new soybeans.

The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the exhaustion doctrine did not give Bowman the right to purchase the patented soybeans at the grain elevator, plant them, and grow a new crop. The Court’s reasoning relied primarily on the fact that there are many ways to use soybeans that do not require self-replication (e.g., using the soybeans for human or animal consumption).

Engineering undergrads create game-changing asthma management device

Neil Schoenherr — 2013-05-15 00:00:00

http://youtu.be/zBGm83pNxuo

Engineering students Andrew Brimer and Abigail Cohen discuss their project, Sparo Labs, which recently won the $25,000 prize in the Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering & Applied Science's inaugural Discovery Competition. Sparo Labs results from an award-winning project to develop a low-cost, pocket-sized spirometer to measure lung function in patients with chronic respiratory diseases.

An estimated 300 million people in the world suffer from asthma. That number is expected to grow to more than 400 million by 2025. While diagnosis and treatment in the United States is accessible, people living in the developing world have a much more difficult time.

Thanks to a new product being developed by engineering students at Washington University in St. Louis, those millions of people may have new hope.

Andrew Brimer, senior majoring in mechanical engineering, and Abigail Cohen, senior majoring in biomedical engineering, have created a new portable and low-cost spirometer, which they hope will revolutionize the way asthma and other chronic respiratory diseases are diagnosed and treated.

Through creation of this device their company, Sparo Labs, can empower patients to connect with their doctors in tracking and managing asthma, cystic fibrosis, COPD and other diseases through seamless integration with mobile devices.

The team has spent more than a year and a half developing a spirometer that conquers issues of high cost and difficulty of use, drawing on the expertise and hard work of a number of fellow
students and advisors.

Most spirometers cost between $1,000 and $2,000, making them unaffordable to hospitals in the developing world. However, the Sparo Labs device will cost just $8. In addition to the low cost, the Sparo design does not require calibration, which has been a big hurdle to personal use of spirometers.

Sparo Labs is drawing quite a bit of attention, having won this year’s $30,000 Olin Cup top prize, the $25,000 top prize in the inaugural Discovery Competition sponsored by the School of Engineering & Applied Science and a $50,000 Arch Grant.

All told, including off-campus competitions, the team has earned more than $150,000.

Brimer and Cohen say they owe much of their success to the nurturing entrepreneurial spirit at Washington University in St. Louis.

“The university is doing a great job promoting and encouraging entrepreneurship on all levels, from the ‘back of a napkin ideas’ that can be pitched at an IdeaBounce, to the Olin Cup or Discovery Competition that help foster more developed or mature projects into real companies with serious funding,” Brimer says.

"Washington University's focus on entrepreneurship has allowed us and other students the ability to get valuable feedback and funding to help turn ideas into viable companies with large potential for impact," Cohen says.

The pair has received mentorship from the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Hatchery entrepreneurship course at Olin Business School and from Mario Castro, MD, director of the Asthma and Airway Translational Research Unit at the School of Medicine.

“The culture of innovation and entrepreneurship continues to grow at Washington University,” says Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center. “The innovation and entrepreneurship initiative is one of the pillars that guides the university’s vision. All students may participate in entrepreneurial coursework and co-curricular programs are open to both student and community entrepreneurs.”

“This is an exciting time for innovation and entrepreneurship at Washington University,” Harrington says. “We continue to see new cross-campus collaborations and relationships with the community that grow the culture and the support system for entrepreneurs.”

Engineers in training

2013-05-09 00:00:00

Sid Hastings (2)

Ritenour High School’s Draye Harris (above) launches a plane on behalf of his team during the annual Boeing Engineering Challenge at the Washington University in St. Louis Athletic Complex Field House May 3. Harris was among 100 area high school students from six school districts on 25 teams visiting the WUSTL campus. The teams, assisted by engineers from Boeing Co., competed to determine which glider had the farthest flight, straightest path, longest hang time or highest quality of flight. Gliders with the most creative appearance and most creative engineering also were recognized. (Below) Members of Eureka High School’s “The Flying Pencils” accept an award for their glider. The event was the culmination of a six-month-long project that began in November when the students visited Boeing to receive instructions from a Boeing mentor along with materials for their hand-held gliders. “This competition really helps students think about the principles of flight and design,” Boeing mentor Tom Brandt said. “They might not all choose to go into the aviation industry, but it gets them thinking about other opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, and that is rewarding to us as mentors.” Boeing sponsored the design competition, with support from WUSTL's Alumni & Development Office; the Institute for School Partnership (ISP); and the School of Engineering & Applied Science. Boeing is a longtime supporter of K-12 education initiatives at WUSTL, including teacher graduate programs through the ISP.

Scientists show how nerve wiring self-destructs

Julia Evangelou Strait — 2013-05-09 00:00:00

Elisabetta Babetto, PhD

Mouse nerve axons (green) connect to muscle synapses (red) to coordinate movement. Three days after injury, these axons are protected from degeneration because they are missing Phr1, a gene involved in removing damaged axons from the body. In mice that have the gene, injured green axons fragment and disappear by the third day, leaving the red muscle synapses without nerve connections.

Many medical issues affect nerves, from injuries in car accidents and side effects of chemotherapy to glaucoma and multiple sclerosis. The common theme in these scenarios is destruction of nerve axons, the long wires that transmit signals to other parts of the body, allowing movement, sight and sense of touch, among other vital functions.

Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a way the body can remove injured axons, identifying a potential target for new drugs that could prevent the inappropriate loss of axons and maintain nerve function.

“Treating axonal degeneration could potentially help a lot of patients because there are so many diseases and conditions where axons are inappropriately lost,” said Aaron DiAntonio, MD, PhD, professor of developmental biology. “While this would not be a cure for any of them, the hope is that we could slow the progression of a whole range of diseases by keeping axons healthy.”

DiAntonio is senior author of the study that appears online May 9 in the journal Cell Reports.

While axonal degeneration appears to be a major culprit in diseases like multiple sclerosis, it also paradoxically plays an important role in properly wiring the nervous systems of developing embryos.

“When an embryo is building its nervous system, there can be inappropriate or excessive axonal sprouts, or axons that are only needed at one time in development and not later,” DiAntonio said. “These axons degenerate, and that’s very important for wiring the nervous system. And in adult organisms, it might be useful to have a clean and quick way to remove a damaged axon from a healthy nerve, instead of letting it decay and potentially damage its neighboring axons.”

DiAntonio compares the process to programmed cell death, or apoptosis, which is also important in embryonic development. Apoptosis culls unnecessary or damaged cells from the body. If cell death programs become overactive, they can kill healthy cells that should remain. And if apoptosis fails to destroy damaged cells in adults, it can lead to cancer.

The new discovery also underscores the relatively recent understanding that loss of axons is not a passive decay process resulting from injury. Just as apoptosis actively destroys cells, axonal degeneration results from a cellular program that actively removes the damaged axon. In certain diseases, the program may be inappropriately triggered.

“We want to understand axonal degeneration at the same level that we understand programmed cell death, in the hopes of developing drugs to block the process when it becomes overactive,” DiAntonio said.

DiAntonio’s major collaborators in this project include Jeffrey D. Milbrandt, MD, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Professor and head of the Department of Genetics, and first author Elisabetta Babetto, PhD, postdoctoral research scholar.

Studying mice, the researchers found that a gene called Phr1 plays a major role in governing the self-destruction of injured axons. When they removed Phr1 from adult mice, the severed portion of the axons remained intact for much longer than in genetically normal mice.

In the normal mice, a severed axon degenerated entirely after two days. In mice without Phr1, they found that about 75 percent of the severed axons remained at five days, with a quarter persisting at least 10 days after being cut. The mice showed no side effects and suffered no obvious problems due to the missing Phr1.

The findings raise the possibility that blocking the Phr1 protein with a drug could keep damaged axons alive and functional when the body would normally cause the axons to self-destruct.

DiAntonio emphasizes that he is not trying to save axons that have no connection to the rest of the nerve. The paradigm is simply a good way to model nerve injury. In many instances, such as a crush injury or disease processes in which the axon is not severed, blocking the Phr1 protein could potentially preserve an attached axon that would otherwise self-destruct.

Importantly, the research team also looked at optic nerves of the central nervous system, which are damaged in glaucoma, and found similar protective effects from the loss of Phr1.

“This is not the first gene identified whose loss protects mammalian axons from degeneration,” DiAntonio said. “But it is the first one that shows evidence of working in the central nervous system. So it could be important in conditions like glaucoma, multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases where the central nervous system is the primary problem.”

DiAntonio also points out possible ways to help cancer patients. Many chemotherapy drugs cause damage to peripheral axons, which may limit the doses a patient can tolerate.

As part of the new study, the researchers showed that intact axons without Phr1 were protected from the damage caused by vincristine, a chemotherapy drug used to treat leukemia, neuroblastoma, Hodgkin’s disease and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, among other cancers.

“In this case, the loss of axons is not caused by disease,” DiAntonio said. “It’s caused by the drug doctors are giving. You know the date it will start. You know the date it will stop. This is probably where I am most optimistic that we could make an impact.”

This work was supported by the American-Italian Cancer Foundation, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant numbers DA020812, NS065053 and NS078007.

Babetto E, Beirowski B, Russler EV, Milbrandt J, DiAntonio A. The Phr1 ubiquitin ligase promotes injury-induced axon self-destruction. Cell Reports. May 9, 2013.

Carter to lead international education and research in engineering school

Beth Miller — 2013-05-09 00:00:00

Dedric A. Carter, PhD, has been named associate dean for international education and research and professor of the practice in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Carter

In the newly created role, Carter will serve as ambassador-at-large for the McDonnell International Scholars Academy and develop international research partnerships with McDonnell Academy partners; develop graduate, professional certificate and summer programs for international students; and work with corporate partners to provide undergraduate and graduate practice opportunities abroad.

He also will provide support for entrepreneurship programs in the school, and as professor of the practice, he will begin teaching a course in fall 2013 emphasizing the role of scientists and engineers in policy formation.

For more information, visit here.

Faulty memory finds a new culprit

Melanie Bauer — 2013-05-07 00:00:00

Grandpa's stories often begin with the phrase, “Have I ever told you about the time…?” What he doesn’t know is that, yes, he has told you about that time, and he has told you many times before.

Why is this situation so typical of our conversations with older adults? A recent study conducted at Washington University in St. Louis suggests it may be due to the changing way we perceive events in our lives as we age. The study finds that this perception is influenced by a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobes (MTL), which declines in functioning in old age.

But how does MTL actually help us remember?

Bailey

“The traditional view of MTL is that it helps us with episodic memory,” said Heather Bailey, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory who conducted the current study along with Jeffrey Zacks, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, and colleagues.

Episodic memory is a type of long-term memory, specifically our memory for events such as our 21st birthday, what we ate for breakfast or our last conversation with a grandparent. However, a more recent view of MTL — one supported by the current study — suggests it is not just responsible for helping us remember the past.

Zacks

“More recent research suggests that MTL is important for helping us identify patterns in our experiences, and chunk and segment them into meaningful events while we’re experiencing them,” Bailey said.

“Chunk” and “segment” are lingo used in segmentation theory to describe the way in which our brains mentally chop up our days. For example, when thinking back on what you did yesterday, you might remember waking up, showering, getting dressed, drinking coffee, driving to work, and so on. Each of these activities is a “chunk” that your brain created and stored in memory.

Study participants viewed short movies of everyday tasks, such as a woman washing dishes, and "chunked" them into segments of activity. Afterward, they were asked to recall what happened.

“It’s not like you press a record button and your brain records your day and then, when you want to think back on it, you’re just hitting a play button and watching a continuous stream of 24 hours. Your brain is naturally chunking the events in your day into discrete parts,” Bailey said.

In their study, published online April 28 by the journal Psychological Science, Bailey, Zacks and colleagues investigated the connection between how people perceive and chunk everyday events and later remember those events.

In their study, older adults were shown short movies of people doing everyday tasks, such as a woman making breakfast or a man building a Lego ship. While watching the movie, they were instructed to press a button whenever they thought one part of the activity was ending and a new part was beginning (i.e., separate the movie into “chunks”). After the movie ended, they were asked to recall what happened.

In addition to assessing memory for the movies, the size of the older adults’ MTL was measured using structural MRI. The study's purpose was to examine the effects of a degraded (i.e., smaller) MTL on how well people can chunk and remember everyday events. The study included both healthy older adults and older adults with Alzheimer’s disease, some of whom had degradation of their MTL.

“Older adults in the study who showed atrophy in MTL showed decline in memory for these everyday activities, and also showed decline in segmenting and chunking these events as they were happening,” Bailey said. “MTL accounted for a huge portion of this relationship we saw between segmentation and memory.”

This means that what people are doing while they’re watching movies or going through their daily lives — how well they’re chunking their experiences into separate memories — has a strong influence on how well they will remember those experiences in the future. How well they are able to chunk and remember is partly due to how well their MTL is functioning, the study finds.

These findings may have relevance in a clinical setting for treating older adults with memory impairments.

“Alzheimer’s disease attacks MTL in the early stages of the disease,” said Bailey. “But even with MTL atrophy, you may be able to train people to chunk better, which might help them remember their everyday activities better, too.”

Forgetfulness is characteristic of the aging mind and conversations with our aging relatives. This Washington University study suggests that the problem may not just be with the process of recalling memories for events, but also with the process of viewing and chunking the events as they unfold.

So, memory improvement for older adults would come from working harder to form new memories better, rather than working harder to bring to mind older memories that already have formed. In this way, how we perceive the world is a strong predictor of how we’ll remember it in the future.

As part of their future research, Bailey and colleagues will design studies to actually combat memory impairment in older adults.

“We want to investigate further this link between event perception and memory. We want to see if we can intervene at an early point in perception, if it will affect memory,” Bailey said.

Three faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences

2013-05-06 00:00:00

Three Washington University in St. Louis scientists are among the 84 members and 21 foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer.

The university's new academy members are:

Stephen M. Beverley, PhD, the Marvin A. Brennecke Professor of Molecular Microbiology and chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology in the School of Medicine;
Robert D. Schreiber, PhD, Alumni Endowed Professor of Pathology and Immunology and professor of molecular microbiology in the School of Medicine and co-leader of the Tumor Immunology Program at Siteman Cancer Center;
Joan E. Strassmann, PhD, professor of biology in Arts & Sciences.

“I’m still in shock,” said Beverley. “I got the news a few minutes before boarding a flight from London back to St. Louis, and I didn’t really need the plane.”

Beverley
Beverley studies the biology of the protozoan parasite Leishmania, including virulence factors, host response and basic metabolic functions of the parasite.

Leishmania infection, known as leishmaniasis, affects an estimated 12 million people worldwide. It is mainly spread by sand fly bites and is a major public health problem in the Mediterranean basin, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America. Symptoms include large skin lesions, fever, swelling of the spleen and liver, and, in more serious forms of the disease, disfigurement and death.

Beverley and his colleagues have probed many aspects of Leishmania biology through the development and application of advanced genetic tools.

Accomplishments in recent years have included the discovery that one group of Leishmania parasites uses a genetic regulatory system called RNA interference. This system normally is used to control mobile genetic elements that can disrupt the parasite's chromosomes. But scientists can now use the same system to turn genes on and off in the parasite, helping to identify which genes are most important for the infectious process.

Beverley is also active in the hunt for new drug treatments and vaccines for Leishmania.

Beverley earned a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and did postdoctoral research at Stanford University. In 1983, he moved to Harvard Medical School, where he eventually became the Hsien and Daisy Yen Wu Professor and interim chair of the Department of Biological Chemistry & Molecular Pharmacology. In 1997, he joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine as head of the Department of Molecular Microbiology.

Schreiber

Schreiber studies the intricate relationship between cancer and the immune system. With his colleagues, he has revived a century-old model of how the immune system interacts with tumors.

When Schreiber began his research, the accepted model of this relationship, called cancer immunosurveillance, suggested that if the immune system recognized a tumor, it would attack the tumor with the same weapons it uses to eliminate invading microorganisms, not stopping until the tumor was destroyed or the immune system’s resources were exhausted.

The model revived by Schreiber and his colleagues, known as cancer immunoediting, also asserts that the immune system can attack tumors. But they propose that three very different outcomes can result. The immune system can eliminate cancer, destroying it; the immune system can establish equilibrium with cancer, checking its growth but not eradicating it; or the cancer can escape from the immune system, likely becoming more malignant in the process.

The research has had far-reaching effects on clinical efforts to enlist the immune system’s help in the battle against cancer. Schreiber’s insight that the immune system can drive cancers into dormancy, for example, has suggested that immune therapy may one day allow cancer to become a chronic but controllable condition.

Schreiber and his colleagues recently demonstrated that some mutated genes in tumors can give rise to tumor-specific protein antigens. They showed that these antigens can be identified using next generation genomic sequencing and bioinformatic techniques, and their efforts now are focused on refining this approach to develop safe and effective personalized cancer immunotherapies.

Schreiber earned a doctorate from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973. After a stretch as a postdoctoral fellow and faculty member at the Research Institute of the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., he was recruited to Washington University in 1985. He received a Washington University Faculty Achievement Award in 2008.

Strassmann’s work focuses on cooperative alliances that have occurred at several important steps in the evolution of life that have proven evolutionarily and ecologically successful.

Strassmann

In collaboration with her husband and colleague, David C. Queller, PhD, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Biology in Arts & Sciences, she has measured genetic relatedness within colonies of many wasp species, including Polistes exclamans, and showed that kin selection theory predicts the existence and outcome of within-family conflicts of interest. They also have pioneered the use of DNA microsatellites for relatedness estimation.

In 1998, they began working with the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum, a model organism for exploring the evolution of social interactions at the physiological, genetic and genomic levels. In a series of papers, they have demonstrated the power of social evolution theory in explaining multicellular organization, from developmental pathways to cell adhesion.

She earned a PhD in 1979 from the University of Texas at Austin. From 1980 to 2011, Strassmann was on the faculty of Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she was the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In 2011, she became a professor of biology at Washington University. That same year, she was elected president of the Animal Behavior Society.

Early responses coming in on Next Generation Science Standards

Diana Lutz — 2013-05-07 00:00:00

The 26 states in blue partnered with a nonprofit educational group to write the Next Generation Science Standards. (Missouri applied to be a partner state but its application was still pending when the process was closed.) Crucially, the partner states include both Republican and Democratic strongholds.

The Next Generation Science Standards have been out for a month now. How are they being received?

California and Massachusetts already have started the process of adopting the new standards. And judging by entries in a blog The New York Times set up to allow science teachers to comment on the standards, most teachers are on board as well.

Michael Wysession, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences, in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis, played a key role in writing the standards.

Wysession was on the leadership team for writing the standards, focusing on earth and space science. He said the team took great care to make sure state legislators and teachers would be comfortable with the new standards.

State control but national uniformity

The United States currently does not have national K-12 science education standards, Wysession said. Each state determines its own standards, reflecting the tradition of independent states’ rights.

“This is the first push at moving us out of a parochial, local view of education,” said Wysession. “We’re saying, ‘You know what? There are things about the practice of science everyone should know, and this is what they are.'”

But it was equally important that the standards not be imposed on the states from the federal level, as was the now widely disparaged No Child Left Behind Act.

The Next Generation Science Standards were written by a states-led team organized by Achieve, a bipartisan nonprofit education group founded by leading governors and business leaders in 1996. Achieve also led the writing of the math and English language arts Common Core, released in 2010.

No tax dollars were spent on the standards. Instead, private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Noyce Foundation and the Cisco Foundation, provided financing.

Achieve hoped to enlist half a dozen states to participate in the standards-writing process, but so many states volunteered to be partners that Achieve had to limit participation.

“It’s a real mix of red and blue states,” Wysession said of the state partners. That’s important because state legislatures must adopt the standards.

But industry is pushing state legislatures to adopt the standards, Wysession said. Industrial leaders realize that to be competitive, they must have access to a workforce that can solve problems requiring scientific and technical knowledge.

What are the odds the new standards will be adopted by the majority of states? It’s too early to say, but one good omen for supporters is that 45 states have adopted the Common Core — despite concerns that they increase federal control of schools.

Shorter but deeper

The new standards replace overviews with a series of in-depth explorations and require that students understand how science and scientists actually work rather than merely memorize information.

“Information used to be hard to come by,” Wysession explained. “My school years were spent bicycling across town to the library to write my reports. Kids now have a universe of information at their fingertips, and there’s no need for students to memorize factoids. In fact, there is too much information available.”

As Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of the journal Science, put it in an editorial titled “Failure of Skin-Deep Learning,” the traditional approach “tends to promote a superficial ‘comprehensive coverage’ of a field. . . . We need to replace the current ‘comprehensive’ overviews of subjects with a series of in-depth explorations."

“We must teach our students to do something in science class, not memorize facts,” Alberts said in a second editorial.

Many teachers apparently agree. Writing in The New York Times blog for science teachers, one said, “Our system progressively smothers curiosity out of most kids by burdening them with dates, numbers, facts and equations that seem (to them) to have no relevance to their lives.”

Another teacher wrote, “Currently when I give them a test, they can provide canned answers to definitions, statements, etc. However, when they have to apply knowledge, they are mediocre.”

A third said, “ “Students must understand how we know what we think we know, how to think like a scientist, and how to engage in the scientific inquiry process. That type of learning is what’s embodied in [the new standards].”

Adding earth science and engineering

U.S. secondary school science curricula are largely based on recommendations made 120 years ago by a group called the Committee of Ten, said Wysession. The Committee of Ten suggested that “physical geography” be taught in middle school and that biology, physics and chemistry be taught in high school.

Things have changed since then, Wysession said. Many of the most important problems we face as a society involve earth systems, such as air pollution, water shortages and global warming. Yet roughly two-thirds of American students report not being taught about climate change, according to the National Center for Science Education.

In the new standards, at the high school level, the attention paid to earth and space sciences is roughly equal to that paid to chemistry and physics combined. In addition, the standards incorporate a new emphasis on engineering, technology and applications of science.

Wysession said the science standards include evolution and climate change as a matter of course. And, he said, “You can’t cherry-pick. You can’t leave out evolution or climate change and still say your curriculum adheres to the national science standards.”

It should be easy to motivate students to learn the earth sciences, he said, because they are directly relevant to students’ lives.

“Go through the front page of the The New York Times over a year and tally up science topics you see,” he said. “You’ll see earthquakes, oil spills, forest fires, tornadoes — all this stuff that’s in earth science. So I think people would love to teach it and students would love to learn about it."

A college teacher, writing on the The New York Times blog, agrees: “The best way perhaps to teach climate change is to integrate it with teaching of chemistry and physics — because it brings a certain reality to these otherwise sometimes abstract subjects."

One concern a few teachers voice is that climate science can be depressing. Students will be taught about the enormous impact of human activities on our planet, Wysession said, but the standards are also designed to teach them how to discover solutions to problems such as global warming.

A science curriculum specialist and middle-school science teacher takes a stronger view: “I believe there is a moral imperative to teach this generation of students about this topic since they are going to be the generation forced to face and, hopefully, solve the effects of climate change most directly.”

Assessment, professional development and money

The new standards are not curricula. They are intended instead to guide curriculum development. It may be years before the guidelines are fully translated into detailed curricula, teachers are trained and standardized assessments are adopted.

Wysession is acutely aware that most science assessments test memorized facts. New tests must be devised if students are to be assessed on what they can do instead of what they know. But, he said, there will be a report on how best to handle this challenge from the National Academy of Sciences in the next couple of months.

He also is aware that many teachers are unfamiliar with the fields of earth science and engineering, so adopting the standards will entail significant professional development.

One teacher raised this concern in The New York Times blog, “As a professor of pre-service teachers for the elementary grades, I am seeing a tremendous lack of content knowledge required to pass teacher licensing tests . . . It appears that the current crop of teachers are dreadfully unprepared to teach science in their classrooms.”

A science teacher and science director in the New York State public schools said that if you surveyed schools to see how many professional development days were devoted to science “your jaw would drop” and that funding for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math education) is a “blip on the radar” compared to funding for language arts.”

“Money will be important,” Wysession said. “A state can be all gung ho about adopting the standards, and then the economy tanks and they have no money for it.”

He has talked to groups of principals who told him pre-emptively that it would be difficult to make changes without new money.

Worries aside, however, it is apparent that most science teachers are enthusiastic about the Next Generation Science Standards and hopeful that they will go some distance to turning around the science illiteracy that long has plagued American students, giving them a better chance for success in college and in the international job market.

Elson elected fellow of arts and sciences academy

Julia Evangelou Strait — 2013-05-03 00:00:00

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis faculty member Elliot L. Elson, PhD, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elson, the Alumni Endowed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, is one of 186 Americans elected as fellows this year by the academy, an organization formed in 1780 to cultivate the arts and sciences and to recognize leadership in scholarship, business, the arts and public affairs.

The academy has more than 4,500 members, including some 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. Fellows are selected through a competitive process that recognizes individuals who have made prominent contributions to their disciplines and society.

“I am delighted that a member of our outstanding faculty has received this tremendous honor,” said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. “Dr. Elson is a dedicated scientist, and this recognition is well-deserved. This achievement demonstrates the good fortune we have had at Washington University in attracting premier faculty.”

This year’s new fellows and foreign honorary members will be welcomed during an induction ceremony Oct. 12 at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Elson

Elson joined the faculty of Washington University as a professor in 1979. In addition to his appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, he is also a professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and an adjunct professor of physics in Arts & Sciences.

His research focuses on cellular motion, the movement and distribution of cell surface proteins and the forces that determine the shapes of cells. He and members of his lab also have studied artificial cardiovascular tissues, including their mechanical and electrical properties.

Elson and his lab members also are well-known for designing and building their own unique instruments to answer specialized questions. One such instrument evolved from a novel technique to measure molecular motion. Elson began developing the technique in the late 1960s, while a faculty member at Cornell University. Called fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), it has evolved into a sophisticated technology that has been widely adopted in labs around the world.

Elson, a St. Louis native, earned a doctoral degree in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1964 and went on to postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. He joined the faculty of Cornell University in 1968.

In 2007, Elson received the Gregorio Weber Award for Excellence in Fluorescence Theory and Applications. The international award recognizes distinguished individuals who have made original and significant contributions to the field of fluorescence. Elson was honored with the Weber Award for his extensive research in fluorescence, including the development of FCS and his continuing work to refine and advance the technique.

Elson has authored more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. He has served on the editorial boards of several of these journals, including The Journal of Cell Biology, Biopolymers and Biophysical Journal. He is a member of the Biophysical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Author of book about the famed Cori Laboratory to open Cori Lecture May 8

2013-05-03 00:00:00

John Exton, MD, PhD, the author of Crucible of Science — a book detailing the history of a unique laboratory at Washington University and of Carl and Gerty Cori, the tremendous biochemists who established it — will make opening remarks at the Carl and Gerty Cori Lecture May 8.

Exton is a professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

His book tells the history of the Coris, winners of the Nobel Prize in 1947, and of the laboratory, which has produced some of the top scientists in the U.S., including six other Nobel Prize winners: Severo Ochoa and Arthur Kornberg in 1959; Luis Leloir in 1970; Earl Sutherland in 1971; Christian de Duve in 1974; and Edwin Krebs in 1992.

Exton will speak at 3:30 p.m. in the Eric P. Newman Education Center first-floor auditorium on the Medical Campus.

The Cori Lecture will follow at 4 p.m. with speaker James A. Spudich, the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Biochemistry and of Cardiovascular Disease at Stanford University. Spudich’s talk is titled “The Underlying Molecular Basis of Human Hypertrophic and Dilated Cardiomyopathies.”

The event is free and open to the public.

Unusual comparison nets new sleep loss marker

Michael C. Purdy — 2013-05-02 00:00:00

For years, Paul Shaw, PhD, a researcher at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has used what he learns in fruit flies to look for markers of sleep loss in humans.

Shaw

Shaw reverses the process in a new paper, taking what he finds in humans back to the flies and gaining new insight into humans as a result: identification of a human gene that is more active after sleep deprivation.

“I’m calling the approach cross-translational research,” said Shaw, associate professor of neurobiology. “Normally we go from model to human, but there’s no reason why we can’t take our studies from human to model and back again.”

Shaw and his colleagues plan to use the information they are gaining to create a panel of tests for sleep loss. The tests may one day help assess a person’s risk of falling asleep at the wheel of a car or in other dangerous contexts.

PLOS One published the results April 24.

Scientists have known for years that sleep disorders and disruption raise blood serum levels of interleukin 6, an inflammatory immune compound. Shaw showed that this change is also detectable in saliva samples from sleep-deprived rats and humans.

Based on this link, Shaw tested the activity of other immune proteins in humans to see if any changed after sleep loss. The scientists took saliva samples from research participants after they had a normal night’s sleep and after they stayed awake for 30 hours. They found two immune genes whose activity levels rose during sleep deprivation.

“Normally we would do additional human experiments to verify these links,” Shaw said. “But those studies can be quite expensive, so we thought we’d test the connections in flies first.”

The researchers identified genes in the fruit fly that were equivalent to the human genes, but their activity didn’t increase when flies lost sleep. When they screened other, similar fruit fly genes, though, the scientists found one that did.

“We’ve seen this kind of switch happen before as we compared families of fly genes and families of human genes,” Shaw says. “Sometimes the gene performing a particular role will change, but the task will still be handled by a gene in the same family.”

When the scientists looked for the human version of the newly identified fly marker for sleep deprivation, they found ITGA5 and realized it hadn’t been among the human immune genes they screened at the start of the study. Testing ITGA5 activity in the saliva samples revealed that its activity levels increased during sleep deprivation.

“We will need more time to figure out how useful this particular marker will be for detecting sleep deprivation in humans,” Shaw said. “In the meantime, we’re going to continue jumping between our flies and humans to maximize our insights.”

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (HL092731) and Neurological Disease and Stroke (NS051305), and the W.M. Keck Foundation supported this research.

Thimgan MS, Gottschalk L, Toedebusch C, McLeland J, Rechtschaffen A, Gilliland-Roberts M, Duntley SP, Shaw PJ. Cross-translational studies in humans and Drosophila identify markers of sleep loss.PLoS ONE 8(4): e61016. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0061016.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Scientists assemble genetic playbook for acute leukemia

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-01 00:00:00

Benjamin Raphael, Brown University

Lines in the circos plot connect major genes involved in acute myeloid leukemia with patients whose leukemia cells have mutations in those genes. For an interactive version of the graphic, click here.

A team of researchers led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has identified virtually all of the major mutations that drive acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a fast-growing blood cancer in adults that often is difficult to treat.

The findings, published online May 1 in The New England Journal of Medicine, pave the way for developing better treatments for AML based on the genetic profile of a patient’s cancer. They also could lead to ways to more accurately predict the severity of disease in individual patients.

“We now have a genetic playbook for this type of leukemia,” says study co-leader Timothy Ley, MD, the Lewis T. and Rosalind B. Apple Professor of Oncology in the Department of Medicine. “We don’t know all the rules yet, but we know all the major players. This information can help us begin to understand which patients need more aggressive treatment right up front and which can be treated effectively with standard chemotherapy.”

Some 200 patients newly diagnosed with AML were involved in the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of The Cancer Genome Atlas project. Nearly 150 researchers were involved in the effort.

A second Cancer Genome Atlas paper will be published May 2 in Nature. That research, also led by Washington University and focusing on endometrial cancer, shows that adding genomics-based testing to the standard diagnostic workup could change the recommended course of treatment for some women.

For the leukemia study, the scientists sequenced the DNA of each patient’s leukemia cells and compared the data to DNA from each patient’s healthy cells. In this way, they found the mutations that only occurred in the cancer cells and contributed to the development and progression of AML in each patient. They also looked for defects in RNA (a close chemical cousin of DNA) and other changes that alter the expression of genes without actually changing the DNA.

“These results provide important new insights into the genomics of a deadly and difficult-to-treat cancer, and underscore the power and scope of The Cancer Genome Atlas project,” says NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD.

Compared to other adult cancers, AML is caused by relatively few mutations, the new study shows. Cancer cells in the AML patients had an average of 13 mutated genes, far fewer than the several hundred typically found in breast, lung and other solid tumors.

By studying a large number of AML cases, the scientists predict they have found nearly all of the major mutations that occur in patients with the disease.

“If only 5 percent of AML cases have a particular gene that is mutated, there is a greater than 99 percent chance that we encountered that mutation at least once in this study,” says co-leader Richard K. Wilson, PhD, director of Washington University’s Genome Institute and research member of the Siteman Cancer Center. “There are still rare mutations that remain to be discovered, but we expect they will fall into the same genetic pathways or gene sets that we identified as being very strongly associated with AML.”

An accompanying editorial by David Steensma, MD, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, compares the new survey of leukemia genomes to Meriwether Lewis' and William Clark's expedition of the American frontier, an exploration with long-lasting influences. Both endeavors began in St. Louis and while the survey of AML cancer genomes is largely completed and similar projects for other cancers will soon conclude, Steensma writes, “the use of genomics in the [everyday] practice [of medicine] is just beginning.”

The researchers found more than 1,800 genes that were mutated at least once in the 200 samples, a discovery that hints at the many different routes that lead to AML. But only 23 of the genes were significantly mutated, and another 237 were mutated in two or more of the samples.

“We didn’t realize how few recurrent mutations there were, and no one was thinking even a few years ago that AML was associated with a high frequency of mutations in genes that encode epigenetic modifiers,” says Ley, who also is director of the embryonic stem cell core at the Siteman Cancer Center and professor of genetics. “This new information helps narrow the search for likely drug targets and markers that can help predict the severity of AML.”

To make sense of their findings, the researchers organized the genes into nine categories based on their function or the known pathways involved. These include tumor suppressor genes, signaling genes and epigenetic modifiers, the latter of which is the most frequently mutated class of genes in the study. Epigenetic changes influence when genes are turned on and off but don’t alter the DNA sequence.

To their surprise, the scientists identified patterns of cooperation and mutual exclusivity between certain genes or sets of genes. For example, a combination of mutations in three genes – FLT3, NPM1 and DNMT3A – were fairly common in patients and may represent a unique subtype of AML.

An estimated 14,600 Americans will be diagnosed with AML this year and some 10, 400 will die. Unfortunately, few good markers exist to help guide treatment decisions for many patients.

Benjamin Raphael, Brown University

The dark lines in the image show all the major mutations for acute myeloid leukemia that occurred in one patient with the disease.

Doctors routinely assess the severity of AML by looking at patients’ leukemia cells for broken or rearranged chromosomes, an indicator of very aggressive cancer. But more than half of all AML patients fall into a diagnostic category called “intermediate risk.” Their cancer cells have chromosomes that look normal or have very minor changes. And while some do well on standard chemotherapy, many others do poorly, underscoring the critical need for better ways to determine prognosis.

“Anything we can do to improve risk classification in this disease is really important because there is a cure for some patients – a stem cell transplant from a matched donor – but it is risky and costly and should only be used in patients who need it,” Ley says. “For these patients, it’s crucial to get the transplant early in the course of the disease.”

Ley, Wilson and their colleagues at The Genome Institute pioneered cancer genome sequencing. Since the Washington University team published the first cancer genome in 2008, the team has found many genetic mutations linked to AML and other tumors that never would have been suspected to be associated with cancer.

Now that scientists have a more complete list of genes altered in AML, the researchers expect other researchers will begin examining AML patient samples banked at their own institutions to understand the relationship between the mutated genes and treatment outcomes.

“We’ve never had such a complete picture of AML,” says Wilson. “Now, researchers can mine this data to determine whether individual mutations or sets of mutations can be used to predict prognosis or be targeted by new or existing drugs.”

Ley, T, Wilson R, et al. Genomic and epigenomic landscapes of adult de novo acute myeloid leukemia. The New England Journal of Medicine. Online May 1, 2013.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Grant numbers U24CA143845, U24CA143858, U24CA144025, U24CA143882, U24CA143866, U24CA143867, U24CA143848, U24CA143840, U24CA143835, U24CA143799, U24CA143883, U24CA143843, U54HG003067, U54HG003079, U54HG003273, and P01CA101937). Additional support came from the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation.

Genomics to reshape endometrial cancer treatment

Caroline Arbanas — 2013-05-01 00:00:00

Robert Boston

Scientists at Washington University's Genome Institute have shown that adding genomics-based testing to the standard diagnostic workup for endometrial cancer could change the recommended treatment for some women.

The most in-depth look yet at endometrial cancer shows that adding genomics-based testing to the standard diagnostic workup could change the recommended course of treatment for some women.

The new research, involving nearly 400 women with cancer of the lining of the uterus, was published May 2 in the journal Nature. The endeavor is part of The Cancer Genome Atlas project, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The study also indicates that some endometrial tumors are genetically similar to subtypes of ovarian cancer and deadly basal-like breast cancer. Future clinical trials should evaluate whether some endometrial cancers could be treated with drugs typically used for the other cancers, said project co-leader Elaine Mardis, PhD, co-director of The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The other co-leader is Douglas A. Levine, MD, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

A second Cancer Genome Atlas paper was published May 1 in The New England Journal of Medicine. That research, also led by Washington University, describes finding virtually all the major mutations involved in acute myeloid leukemia.

While gynecologic oncologists have long recognized two subtypes of endometrial cancer, one more aggressive than the other, the new data reveal four novel subtypes and also suggest that the frequency of mutations in a tumor could be used to help guide treatment decisions.

“We are entering an era when tumors can be evaluated from a genomics standpoint, not just by looking at cancer cells under a microscope,” said Mardis, also a professor of genetics and a research member of the Siteman Cancer Center. “This more comprehensive approach provides a clearer picture of the way particular endometrial cancers will behave and will be important to gynecological oncologists who treat this disease.”

As part of the new research, a consortium of researchers analyzed tumors from 373 women with endometrial cancer using different technologies to look for defects in DNA, RNA (a close chemical cousin of DNA) and proteins.

Their analysis indicates that about 25 percent of women with endometrial cancer who are thought to have a favorable prognosis based on pathology reports instead have a more formidable form of the disease, based on underlying genetic changes, and should be treated aggressively.

Clinically, endometrial cancers fall into two categories: endometrioid and serous. Endometrioid cancers generally are associated with excess estrogen, obesity and a favorable prognosis. In contrast, serous endometrial cancers are more common in older women and generally have poorer outcomes.

After surgery to remove endometrial cancer, women with the endometrioid subtype typically are treated with radiation therapy to kill remaining cancer cells, while those with serous tumors receive a more aggressive treatment – chemotherapy.

Doctors distinguish between the two tumor subtypes by evaluating cancer cells under a microscope. But categorizing some tumors is difficult, and pathologists don’t always agree.

Looking closely at endometrioid tumors classified as high-grade, meaning they are more likely to grow quickly and spread, the investigators showed that many share genetic features with serous tumors. These include frequent mutations in TP53, a tumor suppressor gene, as well as extensive copy number alterations, which refer to a cell having too many or too few copies of a gene.

“This highlights the benefit of digging deeper to find the genetic drivers of cancer growth,” Mardis said. “Even though high-grade endometrioid and serous endometrial cancer are different from a pathological standpoint, they are genetically very similar and may require a similar course of treatment.”

David Mutch, MD, Washington University

Until now, doctors have distinguished between the two known subtypes of endometrial cancer by evaluating tumor cells (above) under a microscope. The new research identified four novel subtypes of endometrial cancer and indicates that genomics-based testing can help determine which women need more aggressive treatment.

With a complete analysis of the tumor samples, the investigators identified four novel genomic-based subtypes of endometrial cancer, which set the stage for developing new ways to diagnose and treat the disease. The subtypes are based, in part, on the frequency of mutations in the tumors.

“The Cancer Genome Atlas' multidimensional approach to collecting genomic data, including clinical and pathology information, have made these findings possible,” said Harold Varmus, MD, director on the National Cancer Institute. “Without the integrated characterization of so many tumor samples, correlations between histology and genomic data may not have been observed or potential clinical outcomes identified.”

Interestingly, one subtype features an exceedingly high mutation rate in the POLE gene and, in this respect, is similar to an “ultramutated” subtype of colorectal cancer. But, surprisingly, patients with these kinds of tumors generally have good outcomes.

“Having many, many mutations sounds like a bad thing,” Mardis explained. “But these patients can’t fix the mistakes in their tumor DNA, so their cancer cells mutate themselves into oblivion before they have the opportunity to spread to other locations in the body. The good news for these patients is that their outcomes are excellent, and they don’t need aggressive treatment.”

Women with serous tumors frequently had mutations in one of two genes that potentially could be targeted with existing targeted therapies. Those with ERBB2 alterations, for example, may be effectively treated with Herceptin, a drug typically used in women with breast cancer who have the same mutation. Additionally, women whose endometrial tumors have PIK3CA mutations may benefit from drugs that inhibit the gene. Those drugs are now in phase II clinical trials.

According to the authors, the new findings provide a roadmap for future clinical trials for endometrial cancer.

“Each tumor subtype may warrant separate clinical trials because of marked genomic differences, which are indicative of different drivers of endometrial cancer,” Mardis said. “Developing therapies for each subtype may improve outcomes for many women with endometrial cancer and parallel what has been accomplished in breast cancer.”

Endometrial cancer is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer among U.S. women. About 50,000 cases will be diagnosed in 2013, and an estimated 8,000 women will die from the disease. For a majority of patients diagnosed with aggressive, high-grade tumors that have spread, the five-year survival rate is about 16 percent, though chemotherapy has been associated with improved survival, and new targeted agents are being tested.

The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of The Cancer Genome Atlas Project. Grant numbers: 5U24CA143799-04, 5U24CA143835-04, 5U24CA143840-04, 5U24CA143843-04, 5U24CA143845-04, 5U24CA143848-04, 5U24CA143858-04, 5U24CA143866-04, 5U24CA143867-04, 5U24CA143882-04, 5U24CA143883-04, 5U24CA144025-04, U54HG003067-11, U54HG003079-10 and U54HG003273-10.

Levine DA, Mardis ER and The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network. Integrated genomic characterization of endometrial carcinoma. Nature. May 2, 2013.

Students' low-cost medical device wins inaugural Discovery Competition

Beth Miller — 2013-04-30 00:00:00

A low-cost medical device targeted at improving world health has taken the top prize in Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering & Applied Science’s inaugural Discovery Competition.

Sparo Labs took the largest prize of $25,000. The company’s plan stems from an award-winning project to develop a low-cost, pocket-sized spirometer, which measures lung function.

The team plans to further develop the product to prepare it for clinical trials. The end goal is to make the device available for individuals in the United States and other developed countries to better monitor lung disorders and for health-care providers in developing countries to better diagnose lung disorders such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders and cystic fibrosis.

Team members are Andrew Brimer, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering; Abigail Cohen, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering; Philip Thomas, a senior majoring in systems science and engineering and physics; Jon Koo, a senior majoring in environmental studies in Arts & Sciences and business; and Chris Cassidy, a senior majoring in finance and entrepreneurship.

“We are very proud of all of the students who participated in this competition,” said Ralph Quatrano, PhD, dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science. “Each of the finalist teams showed exceptional maturity, insight and ambition in their proposals. We are very excited to see how their ideas progress. And next year, we will definitely continue this entrepreneurial activity, which has been generously supported by our engineering alumni. ”

“The students responded to this challenge with some very creative ideas,” said Dennis Mell, director of the Discovery Competition and professor of practice. “I can only hope that some of our future Discovery Competition teams can meet the high bar of achievement set by these teams.”

In the final team presentations April 17, each team was judged on how its members described the product or technology and identified customers, estimation of the market size and team dynamics.

Team BMC Protein, which is developing a new technology that uses the bacterial microcompartment as a platform for in-vivo protein expression, received a $10,000 prize. The team’s goal is to create a standardized and efficient way to produce recombinant proteins that will save scientists time. They plan to create a kit containing a carboxysome-producing strain of E. coli bacteria, along with a genetic tool that will assist scientists in producing proteins.

The team’s members are Andrew Ng, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering; Benjamin Todd, a junior majoring in business; Brian Basco, a junior majoring in biology in Arts & Sciences; Caleb Ford, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering; and Lucas Harrington, a senior majoring in chemistry in Arts & Sciences.

The Biliboyz/LumaCure team received a $5,000 prize for its proposal for a low-cost alternative to treating jaundice in newborns by creating a “biliblanket,” a small, glowing mat placed directly next to the infant’s skin, requiring much less power and cost than those currently used.

The team built a prototype that uses electroluminescent materials to transmit light, eliminating the need for expensive fiber optics, and to supply a low-cost, reliable and safe treatment for jaundice in newborns, particularly in the developing world.

The team’s members are Charles Wu, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering; John Prewitt, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering and biology; Huy Lam, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering; Matthew Speizman, a freshman biomedical engineering major; Yoga Shentu, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering; and Fangzhou Xiao, a freshman majoring in biomedical engineering and mathematics in Arts & Sciences.

Team L3DC received $2,500 for its development of a self-assessment tool to measure symptoms of a tremor in patients with Parkinson’s disease. The software uses a small USB device from LeapMotion Inc. to create a quantitative method for 3-D measurements of a Parkinsonian tremor. This analysis will provide an easy measurement of the tremor that is useful for physicians to assess patients.

The product is expected to allow doctors to more easily track the progression of the disease over time as well as the patient’s response to drug treatments.

The team’s members are Matthew Johnson, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering and electrical engineering; Vinoo Ganesh, a senior majoring in computer science; Ethan Green, a senior majoring in computer science and entrepreneurship; and Andrew Cowley, a senior majoring in electrical engineering.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science launched the Discovery Competition in September to promote new and innovative discoveries to solve challenges or needs.

The competition provides engineering undergraduate students the forum to explore their entrepreneurial interests with support from mentors, to use their creativity to develop solutions for real-world problems and to compete for financial resources that could help turn their ideas into businesses. The competition will be an annual event.

Teams were composed only of currently enrolled WUSTL undergraduate students, with at least one engineering student and at least one non-engineering student on each team. Students from all four undergraduate schools were represented on these teams and are encouraged to take part next year.

For more information, visit engineering.wustl.edu/discovery.

Off to the races: 2013 car revealed

2013-04-29 00:00:00

Whitney Curtis

Senior Matt Monson, a mechanical engineering major in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and chief engineer of the WU Racing Team, gives a big thumbs-up after helping to reveal the team's 2013 race car April 25 in Danforth University Center. Mechanical engineering junior Surjan Singh (far right), president of WU Racing, shows off the car to interested students. Each May, the WU Racing Team, including about 22 WUSTL students, participates in the Formula Society of Automotive Engineers competition at Michigan International Speedway, competing against 119 other schools from around the world. The competition evaluates all aspects of the prototype car, including on-track performance, marketability, manufacturing, engineering design and cost efficiency. "Team members gain valuable hands-on experience to complement what they learn in the classroom,” said team member Tyler Willibrand, senior mechanical engineering major. “These hands-on experiences are crucial after graduation and, I believe, make us the best up-and-coming engineers."

Engineering professor working to help bridges withstand natural disaster

Beth Miller — 2013-04-30 00:00:00

The Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge in Cape Girardeau, Mo., was used as a case study for a novel Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator developed by Chenyang Lu, PhD, and collaborators.

Structural control systems have the potential to help our civil infrastructure, such as bridges, roads and buildings, withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes or storms. However, traditional control systems based on sensors connected by wired networks are costly, labor-intensive and tend to break during disasters, when they are needed most.

Recently, engineers have begun to use wireless networks that are easier, cheaper and more resilient to structural damage, such as that wrought by earthquakes or hurricanes, as they are able to reroute data to still provide it at critical times.

Chenyang Lu, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, teamed with colleagues at Purdue University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a unique system they call a Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator, a state-of-the-art, integrated environment that combines realistic simulations of both wireless sensor networks and structures.

They say it is a promising technology to control the structures based on real-time measurements from wireless sensors attached to the structures so they withstand natural disasters.

“The wireless sensor network community has sophisticated mathematical models to simulate these complicated dynamic behaviors of wireless, which have been tested in many environments,” Lu said. “The civil engineering community has developed structural models for studying structural dynamics. In our novel approach, we put these two together and integrated the simulation environment into one. We can simulate the physical aspects, or structure dynamics, and cyber aspects, or the dynamics of the wireless communication, in an integrated, holistic fashion.”

To demonstrate the simulator, the team set up realistic case studies of the integrated wireless control system on a bridge and a building. The case studies are the first high-fidelity, cyber-physical simulations of wireless structural control for large civil structures.

For the bridge case study, they looked at the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge in Cape Girardeau. The cable-stayed bridge has a main span of 1,150 feet and carries up to 14,000 cars a day over the Mississippi River.

Cape Girardeau is in the heart of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the most active seismic area in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, encompassing southeastern Missouri, northeastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, western Kentucky and southern Illinois.

Because the Cape Girardeau bridge does not have wireless sensors, the researchers used wireless traces collected from a solar-powered, wireless sensor network, deployed by Gul Agha, PhD, professor of computer science, and Bill Spencer, PhD, professor of civil engineering, both at the University of Illinois, on the Jindo Bridge in South Korea, which has similar design and dimensions as the Cape Girardeau bridge.

“We took the wireless properties from Jindo and added them to the physical properties of the Cape Girardeau bridge with integrated simulation,” Lu said. “The benefit of the cyber-physical simulator is that we can do it virtually.”

For the building case study, they used a benchmark three-story building model built by Shirley Dyke, PhD, professor of mechanical engineering and civil engineering at Purdue, as well as data from wireless traces from Charles W. Bryan Hall at WUSTL, to create the virtual integration.

Lu said the case studies shed light on the challenges of wireless structural control and the limitations of a traditional structural control approach, as well as the promise of a holistic cyber-physical co-design approach to design the wireless control system.

“We have built this integrated simulator that captures both the physical and network dynamics that really enable this research for large-scale wireless control systems that could not have been done in high-fidelity in the past,” Lu said. “In building this simulator, we hope that it has a long-lasting impact to encourage other researchers to do research in wireless cyber-physical systems.”

The team expects the research to result in a reduction in the life cycle costs and risks related to U.S. civil infrastructure. The team also plans to disseminate results throughout the international research community through open-source software (wcps.cse.wustl.edu).

###

Li B, Sun Z, Mechitov K, Hackmann G, Lu C, Dyke S, Agha G, Spencer B. "Realistic Case Studies of Wireless Structural Control." Presented April 11, 2013, at the ACM/IEEE 4th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems.

Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation through the Cyber-Physical Systems Program.

More information about the project is available at bridge.cse.wustl.edu.

2013 Spector Prize goes to two students

2013-04-26 00:00:00

Each year, the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis awards a prize to a graduating senior in memory of Marion Smith Spector, a 1938 WUSTL graduate who studied zoology under the late Viktor Hamburger, PhD.

Hamburger was a professor of biology and a prominent developmental biologist who made many important contributions while a WUSTL faculty member.

The Spector Prize, first awarded in 1974, recognizes academic excellence and outstanding undergraduate achievement in research. Students are nominated by their research mentors for outstanding research that has made substantial contributions to a field.

This year the prize has been awarded to two students, Megan Kelly and Jennifer Stevens, both of whom are majoring in biology.

Kelly

Kelly worked in the lab of Audrey Odom, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pediatrics and of molecular microbiology in the School of Medicine.

Kelly

"I originally planned to complete the premed courses and then apply to medical school," Kelly said. But the summer before I started college, I spent seven weeks in a lab as part of the Summer Scholars for Biology and Biomedical Research program.

I enjoyed it so much, I joined Dr. Odom’s lab that fall. And she filled me with a passion for science, giving me an opportunity to see what it’s like to be the first to discover something, to learn and to solve problems with science."

Kelly worked on the chemicals released by the parasites that cause malaria. The parasites synchronize their life cycles so that, for example, they all emerge from red blood cells into the bloodstream at the same time. In addition, mosquitos are more attracted to people infected with malaria than those that are not. Both observations suggest the parasites may be communicating by means of chemical signals.

"The object of my research was to figure out what the chemicals might be," Kelly said. "I used a fairly new method called SPME to sample the gas above the parasites ,and I found a class of chemicals called terpenes that had been previously unidentified in the malaria parasite.

"We think they may be responsible for some of these behaviors; we have already been able to show that mosquitoes can smell the terpenes," she said.

"Because of my experience working in Dr. Odom's lab, I realized I wanted to do science as well as medicine," she said.

Kelly plans to continue her work in Odom’s lab in the coming year, and then to begin a dual MD/PhD degree program in 2014.

Stevens

Stevens conducted her thesis research in the lab of Bruce Carlson, PhD, assistant professor of biology.

Stevens

“When I came to Wash U,” Stevens said, “I intended to go to medical school to become a physician. My first work-study assignment, however, was fish care in the Carlson lab.

"I had never really thought about research before, but as I attended lab meetings and interacted with others in lab, I began to realize how much fun research is. With Dr. Carlson’s unending encouragement, I started my own research project as a sophomore and became increasingly involved, until I ultimately decided to apply to dual-degree MD/PhD graduate programs last year."

Stevens studied the evolution of weakly electric fish in Carlson’s lab, concluding that fish species invested in either complex electrosensory systems or large eyes with good visual acuity, but not both.

This trade-off implies that species generally cannot specialize in multiple sensory systems simultaneously, she said. That might explain, for example, why bats that rely on echolocation for hunting tend to have poor eyesight and why people who lose their sight sometimes develop more acute hearing.

She plans to start the Medical Scientist Training (MD/PhD) Program at Washington University School of Medicine in June and intends to conduct her graduate work in neuroscience.

Kelly and Stevens presented their research at the Spector Prize seminar April 29 in Rebstock Hall.

As part of the Department of Biology’s recognition of their outstanding work, Kelly and Stevens will be recognized at the Biology Honors and Research Emphasis Reception, at 3:30 p.m. May 15 in McDonnell Hall, Room 162.

Grains of sand from ancient supernova found in meteorites

2013-04-19 00:00:00

NASA/JPL-Caltech/O. Krause (Steward Observatory)

In 2007, NASA's Spitzer space telescope found the infrared signature of silica (sand) in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. The light from this exploding star first reached Earth in the 1600s. The greenish-blue dot just off center is all that remains of the star that exploded.

It’s a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.

By looking at specks of dust carried to Earth in meteorites, scientists are able to study stars that winked out of existence long before our solar system formed.

This technique for studying the stars – sometimes called astronomy in the lab — gives scientists information that cannot be obtained by the traditional techniques of astronomy, such as telescope observations or computer modeling.

Now scientists working at Washington University in St. Louis, with support from its McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, have discovered two tiny grains of silica (SiO₂, the most common constituent of sand) in primitive meteorites. This discovery is surprising because silica is not one of the minerals expected to condense in stellar atmospheres — in fact, it has been called "a mythical condensate."

Five silica grains were found earlier, but, because of their isotopic compositions, they are thought to originate from AGB stars, red giants that puff up to enormous sizes at the end of their lives and are stripped of most of their mass by powerful stellar winds.

These two grains are thought to have come instead from a core-collapse supernova, a massive star that exploded at the end of its life.

Because the grains, which were found in meteorites from two different bodies of origin, have spookily similar isotopic compositions, the scientists speculate in the May 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, that they may have come from a single supernova, perhaps even the one whose explosion is thought to have triggered the formation of the solar system.

A summary of the paper also will appear in the Editors’ Choice compilation in the May 3 issue of Science magazine.

The first presolar grains are discovered
Until the 1960s, most scientists believed the early solar system got so hot that presolar material could not have survived.

But in 1987, scientists at the University of Chicago discovered miniscule diamonds in a primitive meteorite (ones that had not been heated and reworked). Since then, they’ve found grains of more than 10 other minerals in primitive meteorites.

Many of these discoveries were made at Washington University, home to Ernst Zinner, PhD, research professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, who helped develop the instruments and techniques needed to study presolar grains (and the last author on the paper).

illustration Adapted from one by the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network

How small is small? Presolar silicates typically run 250 nanometers in diameter, slightly larger than a virus — and nowhere near visible. For a larger version of this diagram, click here.

The scientists can tell these grains came from ancient stars because they have highly unusual isotopic signatures. (Isotopes are different atoms of the same chemical element that have a slightly different mass.)

Different stars produce different proportions of isotopes. But the material from which our solar system was fashioned was mixed and homogenized before the solar system formed. So all of the planets and the sun have pretty much the same isotopic composition, known simply as “solar.”

Meteorites, most of which are pieces of asteroids, have the solar composition as well, but trapped deep within the primitive ones are pure samples of stars. The isotopic compositions of these presolar grains provide clues to the complex nuclear and convective processes operating within stars, which are poorly understood.

Even our nearby sun is still a mystery to us, much less more exotic stars that are incomprehensibly far away.

Some models of stellar evolution predict that silica could condense in the cooler outer atmospheres of stars, but others predict silicon would be completely consumed by the formation of magnesium- or iron-rich silicates, leaving none to form silica.

But in the absence of any evidence, few modelers even bothered to discuss the condensation of silica in stellar atmospheres. “We didn’t know which model was right and which was not, because the models had so many parameters,” said Pierre Haenecour, a graduate student in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, the first author on the paper.

The first silica grains are discovered
In 2009, Christine Floss, PhD, research professor of physics, and Frank Stadermann, PhD, since deceased, found the first silica grain in a meteorite. Their find was followed within the next few years by the discovery of four more grains.

All of these grains were enriched in oxygen-17 relative to solar. “This meant they had probably come from red giant or AGB stars,” Floss said.

When Haenecour began his graduate study with Floss, she had him look at a primitive meteorite that had been picked up in Antarctica by a U.S. team. Antarctica is prime meteorite-hunting territory because the dark rocks show up clearly against the white snow and ice.

MANAVI JADHAV

Haenecour with the NanoSIMS 50 ion microprobe he used to look for presolar grains in a primitive meteorite. The silica grain he found is too small to be seen with the unaided eye, but the microprobe can magnify it 20,000 times, to about the size of a chocolate chip.

Haenecour found 138 presolar grains in the meteorite slice he examined and, to his delight, one of them was a silica grain. But this one was enriched in oxygen-18, which meant it came from a core-collapse supernova, not a red giant.

He knew that another graduate student in the lab had found a silica grain rich in oxygen-18. Xuchao Zhao, now a scientist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing, found his grain in a meteorite picked up in Antarctica by the Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition.

With two specks to go on, Haenecour tackled the difficult problem of calculating how a supernova might have produced silica grains. Before it explodes, a supernova is like a giant onion, made up of concentric layers dominated by different elements.

Wikimedia Commons

A massive star that will explode at the end of its life, a core-collapse supernova has a layered structure rather like that of an onion.

Some theoretical models predicted that silica might be produced in massive oxygen-rich layers near the core of the supernova. But if silica grains could condense there, Haenecour and his colleagues thought, they should be enriched in oxygen-16, not oxygen-18.

They found they could reproduce the oxygen-18 enrichment of the two grains by mixing small amounts of material from the oxygen-rich inner zones and the oxygen-18-rich helium/carbon zone with large amounts of material from the hydrogen envelope of the supernova.

In fact, Haenecour said, the mixing needed to produce the composition of the two grains was so similar that the grains might well come from the same supernova. Could it have been the supernova whose explosion is thought to have kick-started the collapse of the molecular cloud out of which the planets of the solar system formed?

How strange to think that two tiny grains of sand could be the humble bearers of such momentous tidings from so long ago and so far away.

Children’s Discovery Institute Awards $2.7 million in pediatric research grants

2013-04-19 00:00:00

Understanding and solving the mysteries of tuberculosis and malnutrition, seeking answers that will help develop and improve outcomes for childhood cancers — these are some of the important new research projects under way at the Children’s Discovery Institute.

Eleven Washington University research teams will share $2.7 million in new grants from the institute, a research collaboration between St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine.

Some of this funding will go to pulmonary research into whether cilia, the tiny hairs lining the airways and nasal passages, can be employed to prevent lung disease. The research also will bring us closer to vaccines that fight common childhood lung infections, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

In another Children’s Discovery Institute project, Lori Holtz, MD, recipient of the 2013 Faculty Scholar Award, will study new viruses associated with disorders of the childhood digestive system. One such disorder, know as environmental enteropathy, leads to malnutrition and stunted growth and contributes to one-third of childhood deaths worldwide.

Meanwhile, scientists specializing in musculoskeletal and metabolic disorders will seek answers regarding sudden infant death syndrome; new ways to regenerate healthy tissues and organs; and new treatments for birth-related defects that affect muscle movement.

“These projects represent the broad range of important pediatric diseases that the institute tackles each year,” said Mary Dinauer, MD, PhD, scientific director of the Children’s Discovery Institute, the Fred M. Saigh Distinguished Chair of Pediatric Research at St. Louis Children’s and professor of pediatrics and of pathology and immunology at the School of Medicine. “Collectively, this research could ultimately benefit millions of children.”

The Children’s Discovery Institute encourages unique, productive collaborations among scientists at the School of Medicine, the university’s Danforth Campus and St. Louis Children’s. Institute-funded projects constitute "discovery research" — preliminary studies that may point scientists down a path that, years in the future, could yield new treatments.

Since its launch in 2006, more than $32 million in awards from the institute have resulted in significant progress in children’s health research. Awardees have leveraged their initial “seed funding” to gain more than $114 million in additional funding resources from the National Institutes of Health and other organizations.

“Through a unique and extensive set of collaborations across scientific disciplines, institute researchers already have made tremendous progress in advancing research into pediatric diseases,” Dinauer said. “There is still a long way to go, and the newest round of funding will help these investigators to provide important insights that have the potential to lead to new treatments."

Children’s Discovery Institute Awards

Gaya Amarasinghe, PhD, will work to move us closer to vaccines that fight RSV, a major cause of lung infections and breathing problems in children.

Grant Challen, PhD, will investigate the pathways through which acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common cancer in children, develops.

Peter Crawford, MD, PhD, will investigate ways to detect low blood sugar in children and its complications, which can include sudden infant death syndrome.

Robert Heuckeroth, MD, PhD, Joseph Dougherty, PhD, and Joshua Maurer, PhD, are studying new ways to rebuild the circuitry that generates healthy tissue and organs when cells responsible for critical structures of the body fail to differentiate, causing birth defects.

Lori Holtz, MD, will test the hypothesis that viruses are associated with the development of environmental enteropathy, a disorder that leads to malnutrition.

Amjad Horani, MD, received a fellowship to identify novel ways to correct the function of cilia in a range of pulmonary diseases.

Megan Killian, PhD, received a research fellowship to study the molecular mechanisms that regulate tendon-to-bone attachment and contribute to new treatments for birth-related defects that affect muscle movement.

Audrey McAlinden, PhD, will look for novel ways to regenerate cartilage tissue after damage from certain childhood diseases.

S. Celeste Morley, MD, PhD, will seek to identify genetic differences that predispose some children to pneumonia.

Christina Stallings, PhD, will contribute to the development of new drug treatments for tuberculosis in infants and children.

Jason Weber, PhD, and Jeffrey Leonard, MD, will study the pathways through which gliomas, one of the most common brain tumors in children, develop.

The Children’s Discovery Institute is a world-class center for pediatric research and innovation. The institute funds the collaborative, multidisciplinary work of creative scientists aimed at some of the most devastating childhood diseases and disorders.

St. Louis Children's Hospital has provided specialized care for children for more than 130 years. In 2012, St. Louis Children’s again made the elite U.S. News Honor Roll of the nation’s Best Pediatric Hospitals, in addition to receiving Magnet re-designation from the American Nurses Credentialing Center, the nation’s highest honor for nursing excellence. St. Louis Children's Hospital is a member of BJC HealthCare.

Washington University School of Medicine’s 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

Steinberg wins 2013 Sowden Prize

2013-04-18 00:00:00

Steinberg

Lindsey Steinberg has been selected to receive the 2013 Sowden Prize, given each year by the Department of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences.

The Sowden Prize is the highest honor the department bestows on a graduating senior chemistry major.

The prize is named in honor of the late John C. Sowden, a professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences. A carbohydrate chemist, Sowden collaborated with the nuclear chemists and radiochemists at Washington University in St. Louis to create radio-labeled carbohydrates that helped to reveal the mechanisms of carbohydrate reactions.

Sowden was a WUSTL faculty member for 16 years and chair of the chemistry department from 1956 to 1963, helping the university earn a reputation as one of the world’s leaders in research excellence.

The award memorial fund was established by his family, friends and colleagues after his death in 1963.

Richard A. Loomis, Steinberg’s adviser and an associate professor of chemistry, first met her in a physical sciences pre-freshman orientation program. “From day one, she was clearly driven to succeed in a career in science,” he said.

Loomis said that Steinberg, as a sophomore, took on a complicated set of experiments to optimize the properties of semiconductor quantum wires. He said she made great strides in less than a year and that her research findings will be part of at least three academic publications.

Steinberg, a Merit Scholar, who is minoring in physics and has a 3.99 GPA, plans to pursue an academic career to “contribute both to innovative research and the education of others.”

Among her extracurricular activities, Steinberg has worked as a Peer-Led Team Learning leader for general chemistry students since her sophomore year. This semester, she will receive an Outstanding Peer Leader award.

She also has been a teaching assistant for organic chemistry and for physical chemistry, and a volunteer with Catalysts for Change, a program to introduce female high school students to opportunities available in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Last year, she won a $10,000 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, a foundation established in 1984 by surviving members of America’s original Mercury Seven astronauts to provide scholarships for college students who exhibit motivation, imagination and exceptional performance in the science or engineering field of their major.

The Astronaut Scholarship is the largest monetary award given in the United States to STEM undergraduate college students based solely on merit.

After graduation, Steinberg plans to attend the Washington University Medical Scientist Training Program in pursuit of an MD/PhD.

Symposium: Finding humanity in advanced dementia, April 27

2013-04-17 00:00:00

Rebecca L. BarNard

A Polaroid self-portrait hand-reworked by Rebecca L. Barnard, an artist, eerily foreshadows her oncoming illness, diagnosed 14 years later.

The Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program of Washington University in St Louis will host a symposium “Finding Humanity in Advanced Dementia” Saturday, April 27.

In this symposium, experts in the fields of patient care, psychology, philosophy, medicine, neuroscience, and a family caregiver discuss the effect of severe cognitive loss on people with dementia and those who care for them and seek to discover ways to honor the dignity of individuals coping with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Greg ruffing/redux

In December 2007, Richard Rubin and his wife, Beck (pictured above), already diagnosed with early-onset dementia, attended a lecture on “Cognitive Loss and Ethics” in Baltimore.

The young speaker asked whether a woman, faithful to her husband all her life, who started an affair in her nursing home, should be stopped. “Should you honor the wishes of a person in the early stages of dementia after she ceases to be a person,” the speaker asked.

Beck whispered to Richard, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and left the room.

A year later, Richard was struggling to keep Beck at home despite progressing dementia. In a moment of desperation, he tried to force her to take anti-psychotic medication. She backed away from him and slammed her head into the wall phone, which crashed to floor. Holding her head, she wailed, “Oh, Sweetie. Oh, Sweetie, I'm just a person! I'm just a person.”  

Richard Rubin will be the first speaker in the symposium “Finding Humanity in Advanced Dementia.”

The symposium will begin with a personal perspective presented by Richard M. Rubin, PhD, a lecturer in philosophy in University College (see sidebar).

Peggy Szwabo, PhD, a mental health consultant, then will discuss dementia caregiving from a clinical perspective.

She will be followed by Jason Karlawish, MD, professor of medicine, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and by Agnieszka Jaworska, PhD, associate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside.

John C. Morris, MD, the Harvey A. and Dorismae Hacker Friedman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and Marcus E. Raichle, MD, professor of radiology, neurology, neurobiology and biomedical engineering, both at Washington University in St. Louis, will discuss biological aspects of dementia, and Raichle will present a case history from his own family.

All of the speakers, together with Rebecca Dresser, JD, the Daniel Noyes Professor of Law and professor of ethics in medicine at WUSTL, will take part in a panel discussion, and Carl Craver, PhD, professor of philosophy in Arts & Sciences at WUSTL, will deliver concluding remarks.

The symposium, which runs from 1 to 7:30 p.m. in Wilson Hall, Room 214, on the university’s Danforth Campus, is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, so pre-registration is enouraged. To register, email: wustldementiasymposium@gmail.com.

Futher details and additional resources for people struggling with dementia can be found at: https://pages.wustl.edu/dementiasymposium.

Alvarez-Cohen to deliver Ninth Annual Ryckman Lecture

Beth Miller — 2013-04-17 00:00:00

Lisa Alvarez-Cohen, PhD, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will give the Ninth Annual Ryckman Lecture at 1:30 p.m. Friday, April 19.

Alvarez-Cohen, the Fred and Claire Sauer Professor and past chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, will speak on “From Individuals to Community: A Molecular-Based Systems Approach to Understanding Bioremediation.” The lecture, in the Stephen F. and Camilla T. Brauer Hall, Room 12, is free and open to the public, though RSVP is requested.

Her research areas include environmental microbiology and ecology, biotransformation and fate of environmental contaminants, and developing molecular and isotopic techniques for studying microbial ecology of environmental microbial communities. She teaches courses in environmental microbiology, environmental engineering and biological process engineering, and has co-written an undergraduate textbook titled Environmental Engineering Science.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science inaugurated the Rick and Betty Ryckman Lecture Series in 2003 to promote environmental engineering science education. This series pays tribute to De Vere W. “Rick” Ryckman, who was the founding director of Washington University’s environmental engineering science program, and his wife, Betty Ryckman, who generously opened her home to the many students of this program and their families.

In the mid-1950s, Ryckman built a top program in the new field of environmental engineering. He died in 2004.

Jacoby wins Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to experimental psychology

2013-04-16 00:00:00

The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) has awarded its 2013 Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award to Larry L. Jacoby, PhD, an internationally recognized scholar of human memory and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jacoby

Citing “ his imaginative investigations of unconscious influences on memory, the nature of memory attributions and the effects of cognitive aging on memory,” the society presented Jacoby with the award at its annual banquet March 30 at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Founded in 1904, the society is an honorary elected group of about 200 psychologists. The Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award is given to senior individuals with outstanding records of sustained contribution to experimental psychology.

“Dr. Jacoby is hugely deserving of receiving this honor,” said SEP secretary-treasurer Robert Nosofsky. “For decades, he has made extraordinarily creative, insightful and significant contributions to the study of memory and to the distinction between consciously controlled and automatic cognitive processes.

“Among his numerous major contributions involves his insight that individual cognitive tasks do not provide pure measures of single processes. Through ingenious experimental and modeling techniques, Jacoby has enormously advanced our ability to measure the joint roles of consciously controlled and automatic processes in varieties of task performance. The applications of his ideas are extremely far reaching, allowing researchers to better understand age-related differences in memory, fundamental issues in the domain of social psychology, and a variety of intriguing memory illusions.”

Jacoby earned his doctoral degree in psychology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 1970 and took his first faculty job at Iowa State University. In 1975, he moved to McMaster University in Canada, where he would remain for much of the next 25 years. He joined Washington University as a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences in 2000.

In a career spanning four decades, he has made numerous influential contributions to both cognitive and social psychology, especially in the areas of human memory and cognitive aging.

In the 1970s, Jacoby worked on topics of transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory and on the levels of processing approach to memory. Both these topics were at the cutting edge of research in the 1970s, and he made significant contributions to them. In the 1980s, he turned his attention to an emerging field that came to be called implicit or indirect measures of memory.

One of the main starting points of this revolution in the study of memory came from a 1981 paper that Jacoby co-published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, which showed, for the first time, that variables that have huge effects on standard explicit measures of memory such as recognition have either no effect or an opposite effect on implicit measures of memory – in this case, a word identification test.

Jacoby and colleagues published many other impressive investigations on this topic, including pioneering studies of “memory attributions” that examined the influences of implicit forms of memory and how they could occasionally intrude into conscious decisions, and vice versa. For example, his work on the false fame effect or “becoming famous overnight” showed that when people are exposed repeatedly to a nonfamous name, such as Sebastian Weisdorf, and then time passes so that they no longer explicitly recollect having seen the name, they would later judge the name as being famous.

In 1991, Jacoby made one of his most important contributions when he published a paper on the ingenious process dissociation procedure, which permits separate estimates of the contributions of controlled and automatic processes in a variety of tasks, and has had a huge influence on research in several fields of psychology. The paper has been cited more than 2,500 times.

Around this time, Jacoby also initiated his studies of cognitive aging, which during the past two decades have used a number of novel techniques he developed to illuminate the interplay between conscious and nonconscious memory processes in older adults, including demonstrating that older adults are particularly susceptible to false fame effects as well as other memory errors and illusions.

At Washington University, Jacoby directs the Aging, Memory and Cognitive Control Lab in the Department of Psychology. Research in the lab focuses on questions related to cognitive control and to subjective experience, especially the distinction between consciously controlled and automatic processes. Other research investigates age-related differences in memory and perception, memory illusions and cognitive factors influencing learning and education.

Next Generation Science Standards released

2013-04-10 00:00:00

The Next Generation Science Standards have been released, and Washington University in St. Louis members are playing significant roles.

Michael Wysession, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, was among the 41-member team that helped write the standards. And WUSTL's Institute for School Partnership (ISP) is poised to help K-12 schools implement them in the St. Louis region.

"This is revolutionary in many respects," Wysession said. "First of all, it is incredible to have most states in the country adopting a single standard. Having each state do its own thing has been really detrimental to the science and engineering education of this country and this is a tremendous step forward.

"The move away from learning long lists of facts and toward assessing students on what they can do and not what they know is incredibly important in training the workforce for tomorrow and in giving all Americans a greater appreciation of science," Wysession said. "The greater emphasis on societally relevant topics, in particular the high emphasis on earth science and climate, is a very important step forward in making science exciting and relevant to people’s lives."

“It’s a whole new vision of what it means to be scientifically literate,” said Victoria L. May, assistant dean of Arts & Sciences and executive director of the ISP. “We’re moving from standards that were very fact-based — telling students ‘here’s all the information you need to know’ — to a much more conceptual approach because of the information age."

Twenty-six states and their broad-based teams worked together for two years with a 41-member writing team and partners to develop the standards, which identify science and engineering practices and content that all K-12 students should master to be fully prepared for college, careers and citizenship.

"The standards really are much more focused on 'what does it mean to do science and the process of engineering," May said. "It’s how to ask the questions, how to pose the problems, how to think things through. That’s what the ISP has been about all along.”

The ISP is the university’s signature effort to strategically improve teaching and learning within the K-12 education community. Among the programs and services it offers are customized teacher professional development; classroom-ready science materials, with special emphasis on STEM (science, technology engineering and math) education; and K-12 Connections, a program that connects WUSTL students, staff and faculty with volunteer opportunities in urban school districts.

“Kids learn science by doing science — not just reading about it in a textbook and then looking at vocabulary terms,” May said. “We provide materials and supplies that enable students to explore concepts and make sense of them.”

And now that the new standards are in place, the services the ISP provides to the St. Louis region are going to be more important than ever.

“It’s going to be much easier to collaborate with common standards,” May said. “With every state having its own testing system, you really weren’t able to compare and learn from the data. This is going to make it much easier to leverage each work between states.”

To learn more about Wysession's involvement in the process, read here.

To learn more about the ISP, visit www.schoolpartnership.com.

Obituary: Marilyn Krukowski, professor emerita of biology, 80

2013-04-09 00:00:00

Krukowski

Marilyn Krukowski, PhD, professor emerita of biology in Arts & Sciences, died Sunday, April 7, 2013, in St. Louis from complications of multiple sclerosis. She was 80.

She joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1969, became a professor in 1987 and retired as professor emerita in 2002.

Krukowski taught vertebrate structure (anatomy) in the Department of Biology for more than 30 years. Her students raved about the quality of her teaching and often cited the course as the best they ever took at Washington University.

One of her students, Allen Saxon, who graduated in 1971 and later became a surgeon, offered the following tribute to Krukowski in the “Lasting Lessons” section of Washington University in St. Louis Magazine in 2000.

"The value of her teaching was emphasized to me a year later when I was in the first year of medical school at Tulane. The workload of the second semester included two tests a week. It was a challenge just to finish the reading assignments, let alone to fully digest the material.

"The night before a test in renal physiology we had 450 pages of reading, which I hadn't completed. Making it worse, the class lectures had been disjointed and hard to follow. Exasperated, I called a friend in the junior class who was also a WUSTL alum.

"When I explained my dilemma, he said, 'You took comparative anatomy, didn't you?' I then reviewed Krukowski's presentation on renal physiology. Those two or three lectures substituted for the 450 pages of physiology reading.

"I aced the test!" Saxon said.

Krukowski worked closely with fellow biologist Florence Moog on educational activities. Krukowski played a major role in establishing and overseeing the Florence Moog Scholarship program at Washington University.

Krukowski began her academic career as assistant professor of physiology and pharmacology at New York Medical College. After she came to Washington University, she worked variously for the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences, the now-closed School of Dental Medicine and the Division of Bone and Mineral Diseases in the School of Medicine.

Philip Osdoby, PhD, a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, and Julie Glowacki, PhD, a professor of orthopedic surgery and of oral and maxillofacial surgery at Harvard University, both remember Krukowski as a kind friend and generous collaborator.

“She was absorbed by questions concerning skeletal regulation of the fetal skeleton and the impact of maternal metabolism and disease on the skeletal health of the progeny. Much of her work concerned the development of osteoclasts, the cells that are responsible for bone resorption,” said Osdoby.

“She developed methods to determine that the precursors of the bone resorbing cells are in the circulation well before the development of bone itself. She and her collaborators discovered that bone matrix signals are responsible for the differentiation of precursor cells into osteoclasts,” said Glowacki.

“These studies led to the discovery that tissue response to an implant was based upon the implant’s surface charge and led to the development of charged implant materials to foster bone growth and skin wound repair. Two patents on hard and soft tissue repair were obtained for that innovative work,” said Osdoby.

Krukowski earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brooklyn College in New York in 1954 and a PhD from New York University in 1962.

She is survived by her husband, Lucian, her daughter, Samantha, and her granddaughter, Zoë.

Katims to receive 2013 Stalker Award

2013-04-08 00:00:00

Katims

Andrew Katims has been selected to receive the 2013 Harrison D. Stalker Award, given each year by the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences.

The prize is named in honor of the late Harrison D. Stalker, PhD, who was professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, a leading evolutionary biologist, geneticist and inspired teacher, and a true enthusiast of the fine arts.

The award is given to the graduating senior in biology whose undergraduate career is marked by outstanding scientific scholarship as well as contributions to the university in the areas of artistic expression, community service or both.

Katims will graduate this May with a major in biology and a minor in writing, both in Arts & Sciences. Katims’ academic achievements and community involvement exemplify the spirit of the Stalker Award.

As an undergraduate researcher, he worked in the Haswell Lab on an exploratory project focused on understanding the role of a mechanosensitive ion channel in pollen development. His experiments led to new insights on how this protein is involved in an important question in plant biology — how pollen cells germinate and find the egg cells during fertilization in the flower.

He also served as a teaching assistant in the “Introduction to Ecology” course in the biology department and as an intern with the Institute for School Partnership, where he worked on STEM education models and helping teachers to implement new learning approaches in the classroom.

The quality of his writing was recognized by membership in the English Honorary Society, and he is also an artist, sketching and painting in his free time.

Together with Shivani Rangwala, a senior majoring in biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science and neuroscience in Arts & Sciences, he founded the Washington University chapter of Timmy Global Health and served as its president.

As a leader in this program, which seeks to expand access to healthcare globally, he spearheaded fundraising and organization of a group of students and physicians for a trip to rural Ecuador through which 500 people received medical care.

Following graduation, Katims will be joining the MD/MPH program at the University of Miami.

Stardust in the laboratory the topic of 2013 McDonnell Distinguished Lecture

2013-04-05 00:00:00

NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and NOAO/AURA/NSF

Image by Michelangelo or by Hubble? A tiny fraction of the dust like that which makes such stunning patterns in the Carina Nebula was carried to Earth in meteorites and recovered in laboratories for analysis.

Thomas J. Bernatowicz, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, will deliver the McDonnell Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Room 105, Steinberg Hall, at Washington University in St. Louis.

The St. Louis community is cordially invited to the lecture, which is sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.

Bernatowicz will discuss what cosmic dust carried to Earth by meteorites has revealed about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae.

“About 4.6 billion years ago the solar system condensed from an interstellar cloud infused with dust and gas from winds emanating from dying stars,” Bernatowicz said. “In the very hot and harsh environment that prevailed during the early epochs of the condensation, most of these dust grains were destroyed, but some survived and were preserved in the matrix of primitive meteorites, which occasionally fall to the Earth.”

“In this presentation I will show how stardust grains in meteorites can be identified in the laboratory, and how the results of such studies lead to important new insights about the creation of the elements by stars and supernovae."

Bernatowicz

Bernatowicz, who received his undergraduate degree from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and his PhD from Washington University in 1980, is passionately devoted to quality undergraduate education in physics, particularly at the introductory level.

In 2004, he introduced a calculus-based physics sequence, based on the innovative textbook Six Ideas that Shaped Physics and the active learning methods of Thomas A. Moore of Pomona College that train students to think and address problems the way physicists do.

Bernatowicz won the inaugural David Hadas Teaching Award in 2009, in recognition of "his commitment and excellence in teaching first-year undergraduate students."

His research has addressed a wide variety of problems in planetary geochemistry and geophysics, surface physics, and experimental nuclear physics, isotope geochemistry and astrophysics.

Bernatowicz also will deliver a colloquium, titled “Constraints on Grain Formation Around Carbon Stars From Laboratory Studies of Presolar Graphite,” as part of the lecture series, at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in Room 201, Crow Hall. The colloquium is also free and open to the public.

The McDonnell Center, which was established in 1975 through a gift from the aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, is a consortium of WUSTL faculty, research staff and students coming primarily from the departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Physics, both in Arts & Sciences, who are working on the cutting edge of space sciences research.

For more information on the talks, contact Trecia Stumbaugh at trecia@wustl.edu or (314) 935-5332.

Mapping lava tubes in the Galàpagos

Diana Lutz — 2013-04-05 00:00:00

Aaron Addison

A lava tube once filled with red-hot magma flowing down a volcano dwarfs the cavers exploring it. The keyhole profile of this lava tube, on the volcanic island of Santa Cruz, suggests the floor of an upper tube may have collapsed into a lower tube from an earlier eruption. The "rope" hanging down into the tube is actually a tree root. The islands have no fresh water, and the plants in the jungle canopy seek water everywhere — or just enough humidity to make it through the dry season.

Whatever you did for spring break, Washington University in St. Louis’ Aaron Addison and Bob Osburn have you beat. They spent spring break mapping lava tubes — giant tubes through which red-hot rock once flowed — within a volcano on the island of Santa Cruz in the Galàpagos.

Despite the fame of the Galàpagos, many of its lava tubes, home to dark-adapted species unknown to science, never have been explored.

This year, during spring break, Addison, Osburn and a team of nine cavers were racing to map as many tubes as possible on Santa Cruz, which will be the venue for the 16th International Volcanospeleology Conference to be held March 15-22, 2014.

Totally tubular
Addison and Osburn saw their first Galàpagos lava tube during an Earth and Planetary Sciences field trip to the islands in the spring of 2006. Addison, director of Geographical Information Systems and Data Services, and Osburn, a laboratory administrator for the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences — both of whom are speleologists — made a little side trip to a lava tube called Cueva de Gallardo, just to see what a lava tube looked like.

One look and they knew they would have to come back to the islands.

But getting permits to work in the Galàpagos, 97 percent of which is a conservation park, is notoriously difficult. Fortunately, they made a well-connected friend on the same trip: Theofilos Toulkeridis, a faculty member at the Escuela Politécnica del Ejército who does geological research in the Galàpagos.

With Toukeridis’ help, they were able to arrange trips in 2009, 2011 and this year.

Toulkeridis will host the international conference and co-chair it with Addison.

Into the magma chamber

Peter Sprouse

Osburn in a drained magma chamber on the southern flank of Sierra Negra, the largest volcano in the Galàpagos. On the island of Isabela, Sierra Negra last erupted in October 2005. Osburn says the startling colors are due to oxidation of the iron in the lava, most likely by gases streaming from the magma below. The color palette is bit wider than normal, he says, perhaps because conditions were more varied and harsher than usual.

The Galàpagos is a hotspot volcanic chain formed by a mantle plume, or upwelling of abnormally hot rock, in the Pacific Ocean near the equator. As a tectonic plate drifts over the hot spot, magma ascending from below melts, segregates from the rock and erupts to form a volcano.

Wikimedia Commons

The WUSTL expeditions have been to the southern flank of Sierra Negra on Isabela and to Cerro Crocker on Santa Cruz. Most of the people in the Galàpagos live on Santa Cruz and San Cristobal islands. Access to all of the islands is carefully controlled, but especially to Fernandina both because it is an active volcano — it last erupted April 2009 — and because it is the only island still without invasive species.

A chain of volcanoes is formed as the crustal plate creeps over the hot spot. In a typical hot-spot volcanic chain, such as the Hawaiian Islands, the islands at one end of the chain are older and dormant and those at the other end are younger and still active.

The theory doesn’t quite work for the Galàpagos, however. The Galàpagos hot spot lies close to the Galàpagos spreading center, a mid-ocean ridge where the ocean crust is pulling apart, generating huge volumes of lava that probably are contaminating the hot-spot lava. The chemistry of the lavas suggests at least four reservoirs of magma are feeding the hot spot.

“Most volcanoes do not produce lava tubes,” Osburn said. "To get a tube the lava has to be fluid (basaltic rather than rhyolitic) and fairly hot. The eruption has to be fairly voluminous so that the flow continues long enough to channelize and for the channel to roof over. Volcanoes that erupt fluid basaltic lavas tend to form shield volcanoes with flat profiles and gentle slopes, which also favor the formation of long-lasting lava tubes.”

“Lava tubes form because cooling lava is a fantastic insulator,” Addison said. “As the lava begins to race down the slopes of the volcano, its outside cools much faster than the core, but because the cooled lava is such a good thermal insulator, the core remains superheated and can flow long distances, in some cases tens of kilometers.”

Mapping the tubes

Aaron Addison

Team members Rick Haley of the Cave Research Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to the exploration and conservation of caves, and (far ahead) Toulkeridis in a lava tube on Santa Cruz. The benches, or ridges, at the sides of the tube form when lava flows at the same level for some time. On the ceiling is a blister, a pocket that somehow filled with air while the lava was cooling.

During this spring’s expedition, Addison kept a blog of the team’s adventures, called “Galàpagos Cave Exploration — 2013”
that is full of astonishing images of the tubes (and a gorgeous photo of a fever of manta rays swimming off the pier at Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz).

“Despite its romantic associations, the Galàpagos is a very hostile place to do research,” Addison said. “The equator runs through the northern part of the archipelago, so it’s very hot and the days are very long. In the highlands, it rains almost every day. It wears you down.”

They stayed in a hotel that cost $14 a night, with only a fan for cooling, and not even that during the three total-island blackouts when the diesel generators broke down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9XWu0qHmNA

While the team was mapping the caves, there was a torrential downpour unlike anything the locals ever had seen, and water came flooding into the tubes they were exploring.

They located tubes by talking to local ranch owners, who often were able to lead them to openings to “tunnels” on their land. Once they found a tube, they took a GPS fix at its opening. Then, as they walked the tube, they charted the heading, elevation and distance between selected “stations,” and used those measurements to draw plan and profile maps of the tube.

Aaron Addison

Addison’s field notebook. For a bigger image click here. To the upper left are station numbers. From station 13 to 14, the distance was 15.87 meters, the heading was 210.5 degrees and the elevation was -2.5 degrees. These measurements were used to make the plan view of the tube. The small ovals to the side of the plan view are cross sections of the tube. The keyhole cross section and ladder to the upper right was formed when the upper tube collapsed into a lower one. The dotted circle beneath an ellipsoidal cross section downstream of that point indicates that here the two tubes run in parallel.

They’ll be back to do it again for the international symposium — or sooner if they can organize the funds.

In the meantime, we all may be able to participate as well, if only vicariously. In 2012, Addison made the trip to the Galàpagos as a consultant for Colossus Productions, a production company shooting an IMAX movie of the Galàpagos starring David Attenborough. The film, called Galàpagos 3D, has been screened in the United Kingdom but has yet to be released in the United States. It features appearances both by Aaron Addison and his fellow WUSTL-affiliated Galàpagos enthusiast, Stephen Blake, PhD, who studies the migration habits of the giant tortoise.

Incoming provost Thorp named chair of new National Research Council committee

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:35:38 CST

Holden Thorp, PhD, who will become WUSTL’s provost in July, has been named chair of a new National Research Council committee tasked with establishing and promoting a culture of safety in academic laboratory research.

Thorp

Currently chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Thorp is among 13 academic and industry leaders who will review current laboratory practices and attitudes and make recommendations to improve the safety performance of U.S. laboratories conducting chemistry research.

“Laboratory incidents in the academic community have greatly concerned many in academia,” said Thorp. “This committee will learn from these incidents and create an atmosphere in which safety is paramount, from the highest levels of administration, down through schools and departments, to individual faculty and staff.”

The committee will meet at least four times during the coming year to acquire information, visit relevant sites, deliberate on issues and develop its report. The committee will make its recommendations to the National Research Council early next year.

Thorp has served on several national advisory panels, including the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board. His other national leadership appointments cover topics including innovation and entrepreneurship, college costs and improving retention and degree attainment. He also served as chair of UNC’s chemistry department from 2005 to 2007.

For more information on the committee and the project, visit: http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/projectview.aspx?key=49533