Every five years or so, the Department of Biological Sciences is reviewed by an advisory board consisting of scientists from academia and industry as well as members of the university’s Board of Trustees. This board reports to the university president and administration about the state of our department. In January, the department was visited by such an advisory board, the first since 2005. Preparing for this visit gave us the opportunity to look back on our recent progress and make plans for the future.

The desert gecko relies on its sense of smell for its day-to-day survival. Its vomeronasal sensory system is highly specialized to detect pheromones released by other animals via a neural circuit of only a few cell types. “This simple circuit has been implicated to underlie behaviors such as aggression, predator detection, and reproductive behaviors. This makes the desert gecko an ideal model system to study the role of particular brain circuits in directing complex stereotypical behaviors,” says Dr. Ken Hovis, assistant teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q). Hovis, a neuroscientist who is interested in understanding how brain circuits guide and direct behavior, will lead undergraduate student projects examining the role of olfaction in specific innate behaviors related to reproduction in the desert gecko. Another new teaching faculty at CMU-Q, Dr. Jonathan Finkel, is also planning student projects about his research interest, fungal pathogenicity.

The Department of Biological Sciences is proud to introduce its newest assistant professor, Dr. C. Joel McManus. McManus comes to CMU from the University of Connecticut Health Center, where he was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Brenton Graveley. He received his doctorate in biomolecular chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center (MBIC), world-renowned for biomedical applications of fluorescence technologies, is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Biological Sciences Professor Alan Waggoner serves as the current director.

In 2007, Professors Bruce Armitage in Chemistry and John Woolford in Biological Sciences founded the Center for Nucleic Acids Science and Technology (CNAST). Their vision was to combine expertise in synthetic organic chemistry with strengths in RNA biology. Center members include 17 faculty from the areas of biological sciences, chemistry, physics, chemical engineering and computer science at CMU, as well as environmental and occupational health at the University of Pittsburgh.

Two Ph.D. candidates, Kaitlyn Dykstra and Tim Jarvela, were named the inaugural recipients of departmental fellowships instituted to recognize the impact and quality of a recent publication. Dykstra received the de Vries Fellowship, made possible through the generosity of alumnus and founder of Medidata Solutions, Glen de Vries. Jarvela was awarded the Semon H. Stupakoff Fellowship, named after alumnus Semon Stupakoff.

Associate Professor Peter Berget joined the department in 1986. As a member of the Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center, Berget used single chain antibody molecules that bind and release fluorescent haptens as a platform for biosensors. Berget also served as the director of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Sciences from 1993 until 2000. A favorite of students, his excellence in teaching earned him the Richard Moore Education Award in 2005 and the Julius Ashkin Teaching Award in 2009. After retiring from the department, Berget began as chair and professor of biological sciences at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Pa.

It’s hard to look down a microscope at the early events of embryonic development and not be awestruck by the extraordinary spectacle: the organized program of cell cleavage indicating a new life in progress. Combine this spectacle with what you might already know about cell biology and genetics and the complexity of what is unfolding is all the more extraordinary. Housed within the fertilized egg is all of the information needed to instruct cells on how to divide, how to produce exactly the right combinations and amounts of proteins in the right cells at the right time and in the place, and how to change shape and move into precise positions. And all of these steps must be done perfectly by every egg. Sometimes, of course, there are errors in the process. The importance of these errors cannot be overstated – a baby is born with a congenital birth defect every four and a half minutes in the United States.

The ability to read the entire genome sequence of an organism has revolutionized many fields within biology, allowing gene function, expression, variation and evolution to be assessed on a large scale and opening the door to new kinds of questions. However, even the technologies that led to the first human genome sequence were too slow or too costly for routine use or clinical applications. As the power of whole-genome analyses became evident, the push was on to develop more efficient “next-generation” sequencing technologies. The recently released Ion Torrent semiconductor sequencing technology is salient among these for its unique concept, speed and economy. It brings high-throughput sequencing within the reach of the small laboratory and teaching environment through its Personal Genome Machine (PGM) implementation.