Jim Motavalli, one of 12 journalists who recently spent 10 days in Woods Hole and at Hubbard Brook, NH, learning the ropes of ecosystems field science, reflects on his experience here. Jim took part in the Logan Science Journalism Fellowship program, which has been offered at the MBL since 1987.
An SJP fellow core sampling at Harvard Forest in 2012. Photo by KM Kowalski
Paloma T. Gonzalez-Bellido, who is now a postdoctoral scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), and colleagues from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Minnesota, and Union College have been awarded a 2012 Cozzarelli Prize by the editorial board of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The research was performed at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus, where Gonzalez-Bellido was a postdoctoral scientist prior to joining the MBL’s Program in Sensory Physiology and Behavior in September 2011.
The study provides insight into basic visual-motor neural processing, and has implications for the development of “bioinspired” prosthetics for humans.
A green darner dragonfly, a member of the Aeshnidae family, in which Robert Olberg of Union College originally discovered the target-selective descending neurons (TSDNs). Credit: Brian Robert Marshall/Wikimedia
“I am honored to receive recognition for this work, for which we bridged the clinical and neuroethological fields, and developed new techniques,” says Gonzalez-Bellido. “This award has provided me with fuel to keep up the hard work and further my research plans.”
In order for a dragonfly to intercept its prey in midair (which dragonflies do with a 95% success rate), it needs to quickly track the prey and predict its future location. To understand how they undertake this complex task, Gonzalez-Bellido and her co-authors studied a small group of 16 motor neurons, called target-selective descending neurons (TSDNs), in the dragonfly Libellula luctuosa. These neurons, originally discovered by co-author Robert M. Olberg (Union College) in the green darner dragonfly, originate in the brain and extend to the thoracic ganglia, where the neural signal is interpreted and translated into wing muscle movements. Surprisingly, the scientists found that this small group of neurons can detect the direction of target prey with high accuracy and reliability across 360 degrees, and that this information is relayed from the brain to the wing motor centers in population vector form.
In 1988, co-author Apostolos Georgopoulos and his colleagues showed in monkeys that from the activity of neurons in the motor cortex, the population vector algorithm can predict the monkey’s upcoming arm movement. However, to achieve a more accurate prediction with this algorithm, upwards of 200 neurons were needed. Thus, the present discovery that a highly accurate neural code carrying information about target direction can be achieved with just 16 neurons is enlightening, and could have applications in the development of bioinspired robots. (Georgopolos is an MD-PhD at the University of Minnesota/Veterans Administration Medical Center who is interested in the development of prosthetics.)
Randy Schekman, PhD, editor-in-chief of PNAS, describes the papers chosen for the Cozzarelli Prize as being “of exceptional interest… These papers are not merely technically superior but have had special impact and maybe novel techniques or novel applications of techniques, or very important discoveries.”
Gonzalez-Bellido sees the dragonfly as a promising model for understanding the evolution of neural systems. “It’s exciting that the same computation [the population vector algorithm] is used by monkeys and dragonflies for this task. Dragonflies belong to the most ancient groups of flying insects on earth, and they have changed little in 250 million years” she says.
The Cozzarelli Award was established in 2005 and named in 2007 to honor late PNAS editor-in-chief Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. Gonzalez-Bellido and the other awardees will be recognized at an awards ceremony during the National Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting on April 28, 2013, in Washington, D.C.
Out of more than 3,700 papers published in the journal last year, the editors selected Gonzalez-Bellido’s paper and five others for the Cozzarelli Prize.
Senior Scientist Rudolf Oldenbourg and other MBL-affiliated biologists and physicists revealed their collaborative process to create informative, beautiful images of cell structure and behavior at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting last weekend in Boston, Mass.
Fluorescence image of a living cell (MDCK) expressing septin molecules linked to green fluorescent protein (GFP). The image was recorded with the Fluorescence LC-PolScope and shows fluorescent septin fibers in color, indicating that the fluorescence is polarized and the septin molecules are aligned in the fibers. Credit: Rudolf Oldenbourg/MBL
“We are beginning to understand the basis for cell organization at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution through the creative application of fundamental physics to microscopy,” Gladfelter stated. “This symposium will help motivate the next phase of interdisciplinary approaches to advance the visualization of life, from the scale of a single molecule to the whole organism.”
The data collected in biological images, Gladfelter noted, not only illuminates basic cellular processes, but is useful for medical purposes: to diagnose a metastasizing cancer or microbial infection, for example, or to screen chemical libraries for new pharmaceuticals.
“These images bring us to a beautiful world beyond the grasp of our normal senses,” Gladfelter stated. “In this way microscopes give us beauty and [biological or medical] application, often in the same image.”
The capacity of microscopes to reach beyond the senses is well appreciated by Oldenbourg, who spoke on New Frontiers in Polarized Light Microscopy for Live Cell Imaging. (Oldenbourg’s MBL co-authors are Michael Shribak, Tomomi Tani, and Shinya Inoué.)
“Polarization is a basic property of light that is often overlooked, because the human eye is not sensitive to polarization. Therefore, we don’t have an intuitive understanding of it and optical phenomena that are based on polarization either elude us or we find them difficult to comprehend,” Oldenbourg stated.
“Like most scientific instruments, the polarized light microscope translates polarization effects so they can be perceived by our senses, in this case by our eyes, and makes them amenable to quantitative and analytical analysis. At the MBL, we are developing polarized light imaging techniques, including fluorescence polarization … for generating time-lapse images that clearly reveal the otherwise invisible dynamics of single molecules and molecular assemblies in organelles, cells, and tissues.”
The events of cell division during meiosis I in a living insect spermatocyte, beginning at diakinesis through telophase to the near completion of cytokinesis. Testes from the Crane fly Nephrotoma suturalis were observed with time-lapse liquid crystal polarized light microscopy (LC-PolScope, MBL, Woods Hole MA, and PerkinElmer, Hopkinton MA). Movie images display the naturally occurring birefringence of cell organelles and structures that are made up of aligned molecules, such as the meiotic spindle and mitochondria. Horizontal image width is 56 µm. Credits: James LaFountain and Rudolf Oldenbourg/MBL
Other talks in the symposium included:
Navigating the Dynamic Cell
Jennifer Lippincott-Swartz (National Institutes of Heath/MBL Physiology Course)
Imaging Three-Dimensional Dynamics in Cells and Embryos
Eric Betzig (Howard Hughes Medical Institute/MBL Physiology Course and MBL Neurobiology Course)
Structured Illumination and the Analysis of Single Molecules in Cells
Rainer Heintzmann (King’s College, London)
Imaging Single Cells in the Breast Tumor Microenvironment
John Condeelis (Albert Einstein College of Medicine)
Single Molecule Imaging in Live Cells
Amy S. Gladfelter (Dartmouth College/MBL Whitman Investigator)
Among the animals that are appealing “cover models” for scientific journals, lancelets don’t spring readily to mind. Slender, limbless, primitive blobs that look pretty much the same end to end, lancelets “are extremely boring. I wouldn’t recommend them for a home aquarium,” says Enrico Nasi, adjunct senior scientist in the MBL’s Cellular Dynamics Program. Yet Nasi and his collaborators managed to land a lancelet on the cover of The Journal of Neuroscience last December. These simple chordates, they discovered, offer insight into our own biological clocks.
The head of the marine invertebrate amphioxus (Branchiostoma floridae), magnified 15 times. Amphioxus are the most ancient of the chordates (animals whose features include a nerve cord), according to molecular analysis. They are important to the study of the origin of vertebrates. Photo by Maria del Pilar Gomez. Click for larger version.
Nasi and his wife, MBL adjunct scientist Maria del Pilar Gomez, are interested in photo-transduction, the conversion of light by light-sensitive cells into electrical signals that are sent to the brain. The lancelet, also called amphioxus, doesn’t have eyes or a true brain. But what it does have in surprising abundance is melanopsin, a photopigment that is also produced by the third class of light-sensitive cells in the mammalian retina, besides the rods and cones. This third class of cells, called “intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells” (ipRGCs), were discovered in 2002 by Brown University’s David Berson and colleagues. Now sometimes called “circadian receptors,” they are involved in non-visual, light-dependent functions, such as adjustment of the animal’s circadian rhythms.
“It seemed like colossal overkill that amphioxus have melanopsin-producing cells,” Nasi says. “These animals do nothing. If you switch on a light, they dance and float to the top of the tank, and then they drop back down to the bottom. That’s it for the day.” But that mystery aside, Gomez and Nasi realized that studying amphioxus could help reveal the evolutionary history of the circadian receptors.
Amphioxus can grow as long as 2.5 inches and are typically found half-burrowed in sand. Photo by Hans Hillewaert.
As so it has. In 2009, Gomez and Nasi isolated the animal’s melanopsin-producing cells and described how they transduce light. In their recent paper, they tackled the puzzling question of why the light response of these amphioxus cells is several orders of magnitude higher than that of their more sophisticated, presumed descendents, the ipRGCs. (In mammals, the ipRGCs relay information on light and dark to the biological clock in the hypothalamus, where it is crucial for the regulation of circadian rhythms and associated control of hormonal secretion.)
By detailing how the large light response occurs in the amphioxus cells, Gomez and Nasi could relate their observations to the functional changes that may have occurred as the circadian receptors evolved and “eventually tailored their performance to the requirements of a reporter of day and night, rather than to a light sensor meant to mediate spatial vision.” The light-sensing cells of amphioxus, they discovered, may be the ”missing link“ between the visual cells of invertebrates and the circadian receptors in our own eyes.
Citations
Ferrer C., Melagón G., del Pilar Gomez M., and Nasi E. (2012) Dissecting the Determinants of Light Sensitivity in Amphioxus Microvillar Photoreceptors: Possible Evolutionary Implications for Melanopsin Signaling. J. Neurosci. 32: 17977-17987.
del Pilar Gomez M., Angueyra J.M, and Nasi E. (2009) Light-transduction in melanopsin-expressing photoreceptors of Amphioxus. PNAS 16: 9081-9086.
Enrico Nasi and Maria Gomez (second and third from left) with some of their students from the Universidad Nacional, de Colombia, where they hold faculty appointments. Nasi and Gomez regularly bring students to the MBL, where they are affiliated with the Program in Sensory Physiology and Behavior in addition to Cellular Dynamics.
A federal advisory committee chaired by MBL Distinguished Scientist Jerry M. Melillo has released a draft of the Third National Climate Assessment Report for public comment. The report presents the latest science about the current and projected effects of climate change across the United States. It is a scientific document—not a policy document—and does not make recommendations regarding responses to climate change. It does, however, describe some of the actions that society is already taking, and can take, to adapt to and mitigate climate change.
“Climate change is already affecting the American people,” the report begins. “Certain types of weather events have become more frequent and/or intense, including heat waves, heavy downpours, and, in some regions, floods and droughts. Sea level is rising, oceans are becoming more acidic, and glaciers and sea ice are melting. These changes are part of the pattern of global climate change, which is primarily driven by human activity.”
The draft then details climate change impacts on specific U.S. regions and sectors, including agriculture and human health, based on input from more than 240 scientist-authors.
The draft report is available for download at http://ncadac.globalchange.gov. Public comments will be accepted until April 12, 2013 and must submitted online. In addition to the public review, the report will also undergo a review by the National Academies of Sciences. The authors will use the public comments to revise the report before submitting it to the federal government for consideration in the Third National Climate Assessment (NCA) Report (to be published in early 2014).
Dr. Melillo’s research focuses on the impacts of human activities on terrestrial ecosystems. He has studied carbon and nitrogen cycling in ecosystems across the globe and has played a prominent role in international climate change policy throughout his career. In 2009, Dr. Melillo co-authored the landmark report to Congress, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,” issued by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. He was also a lead author on both the 1990 and 1995 Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he served in President Clinton’s Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1996 to 1997.
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires a National Climate Assessment at least every four years.
Snow falls on an experimental plot at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., where Jerry Melillo and colleagues have studied how warming temperatures affect carbon and nitrogen cycling in soil and vegetation. Photo courtesy of Jerry Melillo. Click here for full-size image
Welcome to @MBL, the official blog of the Marine Biological Laboratory. Our goal is to give you multimedia glimpses of MBL life and science. If you have ideas for or feedback on this blog, we want to hear your comments.
