This story first appeared in the Georgia Tech Bioinformatics News Center.

The Bioinformatics Interdisciplinary Graduate Program is proud to announce Devika Singh as our winner for the inaugural “Mark Borodovsky Prize in the College of Sciences” for the Top Bioinformatics PhD student, 2021.  The Borodovsky Prize is intended to recognize outstanding academic merit at Georgia Tech.

Devika works with professor Soojin Yi, in the Comparative Genomics and Epigenomics Lab at Georgia Tech.  Devika completed both her bachelor’s (Biology) degree and her master’s (Bioinformatics) degrees at Georgia Tech.  She worked for one year at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before returning to Georgia Tech to pursue her doctoral studies in 2017. 

Devika’s doctoral work integrates large “-omics” datasets to study broad questions around the organization and evolution of non-coding regulatory regions, particularly enhancers, in the human genome. This work includes investigating the underlying architecture of enhancer-gene regulatory networks utilizing multi-tissue, whole-genome chromatin state maps (Results published in MBE). Indicative of the breadth of research in the Yi lab, Devika also worked on projects which analyzed DNA methylation signatures in non-human primates and non-model organisms. In collaboration with researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Australia Museum, she generated and explored the first tissue- and sex-inclusive, whole-genome “DNA methylome atlas” for the modern koala.

So far in her studies, Devika has published eight papers, including five first-author papers.  In addition, Devika gave a poster presentation at a CDC conference in 2017.  She also received a travel award to present her work at the Allied Genetics Conference earlier this year. Although the meeting was canceled at the last minute due to the pandemic, the fact that Devika was granted a travel award and invited for a presentation speaks for the strength of her work.

Yi notes, “Devika and I have several projects in the pipeline, and I expect she will have at least two additional papers as the lead author from her PhD studies. She is one of the best students I have worked with during my 16 years as a faculty member at Georgia Tech.”

The Borodovsky Prize nominations were reviewed by an interdisciplinary committee of faculty members, including Joe Lachance (College of Sciences), Peng Qiu (College of Engineering), and Xiuwei Zhang (College of Computing).  According to the committee, “Devika Singh exhibited an impressive ability to both analyze complex bioinformatics datasets and frame her research within a larger biological context.  Despite the pandemic, she was able to publish three high-profile first author papers in 2021.  Topics covered in these papers ranged from the evolution of regulatory DNA in humans to epigenetics in koalas.”

Congratulations to Devika!

This story first appeared in the Georgia Tech News Center.

Located on the rooftops of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons and The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, the Urban Honey Bee Project is a unique interdisciplinary undergraduate research program focused on the impact of urban habitats on honey bees.

May 20 has been designated by the United Nations as World Bee Day, aimed at raising awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face, and their contribution to sustainable development. 

Many of Georgia Tech’s research projects focus on improving the human condition and nurturing the well-being of human communities, but the Urban Honey Bee project is all about improving conditions for these beneficial social insects.

The director of the Urban Honey Bee Project is Jennifer Leavey, a principal academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences and the College of Sciences.

“The project allows Georgia Tech students to apply what they are learning in science, engineering, and computing courses to the study of urban pollinators. This could lead to improvements in urban food production or a better understanding of urban ecosystems,” Leavey says.

Not only does it provide honey to students, but the Urban Honey Bee Project has also been tagging bees with RFID chips, which are scanned by readers installed at hive entrances. This allows tracking of the honey bees so they know which bees are coming and going. 

“Kind of like mini BuzzCards.”

The group is interested in the mating behavior of bees in urban areas. Genetic diversity among male bees in honey bee mating areas can lead to stronger, healthier honey bee colonies.

“We tag male bees with RFID chips, which allows us to know how old they are when they start taking mating flights, and how weather, pollution, nutrition, and pesticide exposures affect their behavior. We can also correlate this behavior with genetic markers,” Leavey explains.

This work was inspired by Julia Mahood, an Atlanta-area master beekeeper and founder of the citizen science project mapmydca.com. She is identifying honey bee mating areas (also known as drone congregation areas) using mechanical drones.  

Many wild flowering plant species along with food crops in our ecosystem depend on pollinators and it is crucial to learn as much as we can about honey bees, and all pollinators, to safeguard their future and ours.

To learn more about the Urban Honey Bee Project visit bees.gatech.edu.

This story first appeared in Georgia Tech Research Horizons.

Chronic skin itching drives more people to the dermatologist than any other condition. In fact, the latest science literature finds that 7% of U.S. adults, and between 10 and 20% of people in developed countries, suffer from dermatitis, a common skin inflammatory condition that causes itching. 

“Itch is a significant clinical problem, often caused by underlying medical conditions in the skin, liver, or kidney. Due to our limited understanding of itch mechanisms, we don’t have effective treatment for the majority of patients,” said Liang Han, an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Biological Sciences who is also a researcher in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

Until recently, neuroscientists considered the mechanisms of skin itch the same. But Han and her research team recently uncovered differences in itch in non-hairy versus hairy areas of the skin, opening new areas for research. Their research, published April 13 in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), could open new, more effective treatments for patients suffering from persistent skin itching.

Itch Origins More Than Skin Deep

According to researchers, there are two different types of stimuli from the nervous system that trigger the itch sensation through sensory nerves in the skin: chemical and mechanical. In their study, Han and her team identified a specific neuron population that controls itching in ‘glabrous’ skin -- the smoother, tougher skin that’s found on the palms of hands and feet soles. 

Itching in those areas poses greater difficulty for sufferers and is surprisingly common. In the U.S., there are an estimated 200,000 cases a year of dyshidrosis, a skin condition causing itchy blisters to develop only on the palm and soles. Another chronic skin condition, palmoplantar pustulosis (a type of psoriasis that causes inflamed, scaly skin and intense itch on the palms and soles), affects as many as 1.6 million people in the U.S. each year.

“That’s actually one of the most debilitating places (to get an itch),” said first author Haley R. Steele, a graduate student in the School of Biological Sciences. “If your hands are itchy, it’s hard to grasp things, and if it’s your feet, it can be hard to walk. If there’s an itch on your arm, you can still type. You’ll be distracted, but you’ll be OK. But if it’s your hands and feet, it’s harder to do everyday things.”

Ability to Block, Activate Itch-causing Neurons in Lab Mice

Since many biological mechanisms underlying itch — such as receptors and nerve pathways — are similar in mice and people, most itch studies rely on mice testing. Using mice in their lab, Georgia Tech researchers were able to activate or block these neurons.  

The research shows, for the first time, “the actual neurons that send itch are different populations. Neurons that are in hairy skin that do not sense itch in glabrous skins are one population, and another senses itch in glabrous skins.”

Why has an explanation so far eluded science? “I think one reason is because most of the people in the field kind of assumed it was the same mechanism that’s controlling the sensation. It’s technically challenging. It’s more difficult than working on hairy skin,” Han said.

To overcome this technical hurdle, the team used a new investigative procedure, or assay, modeled after human allergic contact dermatitis, Steele said.

The previous method would have involved injecting itch-causing chemicals into mice skin, but most of a mouse’s skin is covered with hair. The team had to focus on the smooth glabrous skin on tiny mice hands and feet. Using genetically modified mice also helped identify the right sensory neurons responsible for glabrous skin itches. 

“We activated a particular set of neurons that causes itch, and we saw that biting behavior again modeled,” said Steele, referring to how mice usually deal with itchy skin.  

One set of study mice was given a chemical to specifically kill an entire line of neurons. Focusing on three previously known neuron mechanisms related to itch sensation found in hairy skin, they found that two of the neurons, MrgprA3+ and MrgprD+, did not play important roles in non-hairy skin itch, but the third neuron, MrgprC11+, did. Removing it reduced both acute and chronic itching in the soles and palms of test mice.

Potential to Drive New Treatments for Chronic Itch

Han’s team hopes that the research leads to treatments that will turn off those itch-inducing neurons, perhaps by blocking them in human skin.

“To date, most treatments for skin itch do not discriminate between hairy and glabrous skin except for potential medication potency due to the increased skin thickness in glabrous skin,” observed Ron Feldman, assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology in the Emory University School of Medicine. Georgia Tech’s findings “provide a rationale for developing therapies targeting chronic itching of the hands and feet that, if left untreated, can greatly affect patient quality of life,” he concluded.

What’s next for Han and her team? “We would like to investigate how these neurons transmit information to the spinal cord and brain,” said Han, who also wants to investigate the mechanisms of chronic itch conditions that mainly affect glabrous skin such as cholestatic itch, or itch due to reduced or blocked bile flow often seen in liver and biliary system diseases.

“I joined this lab because I love working with Liang Han,” added Steele, who selected glabrous skin itch research for her Ph.D. “because it was the most technically challenging and had the greatest potential for being really interesting and significant to the field.”

This work was supported by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NS087088 and HL141269) and the Pfizer Aspire Dermatology Award to Liang Han.  

CITATION: H. Steele, et al., “MrgprC11+ sensory neurons mediate glabrous skin itch.” (PNAS, 2021)  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2022874118

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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. 

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society. 

Additional Media Contact: Tracey Reeves (tracey.reeves@gatech.edu)

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent

Researchers are already hard at work trying to find fast scientific solutions to the national opioid public health crisis, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was responsible for two out of three drug overdose deaths in 2018. 

Two School of Biological Sciences researchers have joined the effort to find answers to the crisis. Jeffrey Skolnick, Regents’ Professor, Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, and GRA Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology; and Hongyi Zhou, Senior Research Scientist in the school, are on a team that recently captured top honors in a recent National Institutes of Health-sponsored competition to find novel, outside-the-box approaches to the opioid problem. 

Their plan, “Development of a Comprehensive Integrated Platform for Translational Innovation in Pain, Opioid Abuse Disorder and Overdose” — which will use artificial intelligence, data and molecular analysis, cloud computing, and predictive algorithms in the search for new drugs — was one of five winning applications in a November 2020 competition. The results were announced April 26.

Skolnick and Zhou have now won two stages of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) ASPIRE Challenge, part of the NIH’s HEAL (Helping to End Addiction Long-Term) program. (ASPIRE stands for A Specialized Platform for Innovative Research Exploration.

Skolnick’s group includes Andre Ghetti with ANABIOS Corporation, and Nicole Jung with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. 

“We’re extremely grateful,” Skolnick says. “We’re very excited about this. The problem of opioid addiction and chronic pain is a real plague in America and for most of the world, and there aren’t a lot of real, good answers, so this is motivating us to get people to think of novel solutions. We really appreciate the chance to put this team together.”

Rapidly translating scientific advances into immediate help for patients

NCATS defines translational science as “the process of turning observations in the laboratory, clinic, and community, into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public — from diagnostics and therapeutics, to medical procedures and behavioral changes.” 

The 2018 NCATS ASPIRE Challenge involved design competition in four component areas: integrated chemistry database, electronic synthetic chemistry portal; predictive algorithms, and biological assays (strength/potency tests.) Skolnick and Zhou were also part of a winning team in that stage.

Skolnick calls his group’s predictive algorithms “our unfair competitive advantage” — data programs that can predict in advance the probability of a drug’s success. “In principle you could screen every molecule under the sun if you had infinite resources. You could test everything, but that’s very expensive and time-consuming. We can go through this list and prioritize them and say, this one has an 80 percent probability it will work.”

Skolnick’s group added Ghetti and June for the 2020 ASPIRE Reduction-to-Practice Challenge. “The goal of this Challenge is to combine the best solutions and develop a working platform that integrates the four component areas. The Reduction-to-Practice Challenge consists of three stages: planning; prototype development and milestone delivery; and prototype delivery, independent validation, and testing,” notes the NCATS website.

Skolnick says his team’s application is designed to be accessed digitally as part of a cloud service. It will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to investigate molecules that could be turned into new drugs, as well as explore undiscovered uses for existing drugs. 

“Andre’s company is going to do the testing of the molecules, and Nicole Jung will organize all the data and store it so we can have a platform that is used not just by us, but by the (scientific) community,” Skolnick explains. “We’re looking for novel mechanisms for drugs that relieve pain and treat addiction. The goal is to do this at high throughput, rather than one at a time. This is really designed to test the ideas at scale. You can get it to people a lot quicker.”

Skolnick hopes to have a robust working platform built within a year. Given the extent of the opioid crisis in the U.S. alone, the faster new non-addictive pain management drugs can be found and tested, the better, he adds.

“The need is critical. It’s one of these horrible societal problems that really require novel solutions, which means you want to understand all the mechanisms of pain, but do we understand the gears you want to turn to alleviate it?”

From a young age, Chung Kim says she learned how to adapt to life in different areas of the world and make friends with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Now, at Georgia Tech, Kim brings that generous compassion for others in sharing advice and support, encouraging conversations and listening, and helping the graduate student community thrive.

As academic program coordinator for the School of Biological Sciences, Kim helps master’s and Ph.D. students complete graduate school studies and research — from applications and research to dissertations and graduation day.

“I have such respect for students and grad students,” she says. “Some of these students have families, they're taking care of children — so they have a lot on their plate, aside from the enormous amount of research that they're doing. And sometimes they encounter unexpected problems throughout the course of their journey. So I try to help out as much as I can, trying to find resources for them.”

Kim began her tenure at Tech four years ago, after several of her colleagues at Savannah College of Art and Design transferred to work at the Institute. “Every one of them was so happy with what they were doing, and just the whole vibe at Georgia Tech. I just could not resist.”

Turns out those colleagues were on to something. “I would say it is definitely the people, you know — and people meaning the staff, the faculty, the students,” she says. “Every encounter at Georgia Tech has been very positive. To start off with, I share an office with Lisa Redding. She's our other graduate program coordinator. From day one, she has just been this super helpful mentor — I consider her as my mentor, so knowledgeable,” Kim shares.

“And I, what I really love is that, in everything that we do, no matter what our role here at Georgia Tech, I always get the feeling that students come first. And that's something that has really impressed me and inspires me,” she adds. “The students really should come first — that's who you're serving. And that's why we're here. So I think that really stands out to me, and that's what makes me proud to be a part of Georgia Tech.”

Spirit of Georgia Tech

Kim is an active player in building that thriving community and culture. This spring, she was selected for the Spirit of Georgia Tech award, an annual honor for Georgia Tech staff members who “support and uphold the mission and vision of the Institute — and possess character and professionalism that make working at Georgia Tech better.” She was nominated for the award by Redding.

“I was so shocked and it was a really happy surprise,” remembers Kim about hearing the good news. “Lisa forwarded me that her nomination was selected, and she shared the nomination packet with me, which was so touching. I don't know when she found time — because she was super busy. It was very emotional reading everything that the professors and our students had shared. And it definitely was very motivating. It really made me appreciate what I do and makes me want to kind of strive to be better at serving our students and faculty.”

Speaking up for representation and racial justice

Kim also serves as an inaugural member of the newly formed College of Sciences Staff Advisory Council, which acts as a liaison between College staff and leadership and administration, cultivating the opportunity for significant contribution of staff expertise, input, and ideas. The Council is chaired by Kim’s colleague Kathy Sims, who serves as the liaison between the Office of Development and the College of Sciences Dean’s Office.

Over the past year, Sims and the Council have collaborated with Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, to invite guest speakers to a twice-a-month virtual coffee hour for all staff: Dean’s Drop-In.

Earlier this year, Kim accepted an invitation to share her own experiences about growing up in Korea and the U.S., talk about dismantling racial prejudice toward people of Asian descent, and share ways to support the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in the wake of the March 16 Atlanta-area mass shootings that targeted Asian women.

“There were so many things that I wanted to share, but also didn’t really know how to share,” says Kim. “These things aren’t really discussed often, or not often enough, in a professional setting. It’s something that I talk about a lot with friends and family — but I don’t think there was an opportunity for me to discuss these things at work. So, you know, I really welcomed this.”

During the discussion, Kim shared how she felt after an unexpected experience with a classmate and friend in childhood — a moment that struck her as mean-spirited then, which she now realizes was a first brush with casual racial prejudice. Kim also provided a unique perspective on life in the “diplomatic bubble, where diversity was celebrated and respected” — growing up, her father worked for the Korean government, so her family moved frequently. She spent her high school years in Virginia before returning to South Korea for college at Ewha Womans University (이화여자대학교).

“With my parents, we really didn't talk about race a lot because we moved around so much,” Kim explains. Her parents generally focused on her adjustment to a new school and environment. “But for our kids who are growing up — my older daughter was born in Korea, but our younger son was born here — for them to be growing up as citizens, they're going to have a whole different experience. And I want to make sure that they are educated, and that their eyes are open. I don't want to taint their innocence. But at the same time, I want them to be aware that these things are happening. And I also want them to know how to deal with these situations and not be complacent, whether it be directed towards them, or towards others. I want them to have their own voice and stand up.”

Growing up in a mostly white neighborhood in McLean, Virginia, Kim also remembers acclimating with suburban American middle and high school communities. “If they had a spirit week, if it was 80s week or something like that, I tried to do my hair the same way that the other girls were doing, and in the way that they told me would work. But it did not work because I have different hair,” she laughs.

Kim adds that in high school, she realized she had two distinct sets of friends: “I had a Korean group of friends. And then I had my non-Korean group of friends.” At times, she says she felt like she had to be “more Korean” around those Korean friends — careful with her accent and pronunciation, so that she wouldn’t sound American. “And I just thought that was very odd and confusing. But as a teenager, you don't want to stand out in any group, you want to fit in — so that's just how it was! And at the time, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess you know, this is just kind of being diplomatic. I'll just show this side of myself with this group.’ But funny enough, like, I didn't really feel that way with the other crew — I felt like I was more of myself,” she says.

“Speaking with people who kind of had a similar childhood like myself, we always talk about how we don’t feel like we fit into any particular group, so I think we gravitate towards one another,” she shares.

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage and culture

Kim adds, “As I grow older, the line has blurred now a little bit and I’m more comfortable just being myself. There are certain things that, when I do go back to Korea, I know that it’s more culturally expected that I behave certain ways, especially in front of our elders. But as I grew older I was able to find people that were more willing to accept me for just myself.”         

She encourages her kids to do the same — to love the American and Korean parts of themselves. In her household, Kim makes sure to prioritize teaching her children about their Korean culture through cooking traditional cuisine, celebrating Korean holidays, and encouraging conversation about the elements of Korean culture.

In February, Kim’s family celebrated the Lunar New Year with two other families in their Covid-19 bubble.

“There are several kinds of traditions we celebrate,” she says. “We all don our Korean traditional attire, which is called hanbok, and bow to our elders, and then we all get an allowance. And then the most meaningful thing I think is that the adults, together with the kids, give advice or encouragement for the upcoming new year. And then we top it off with eating this kind of rice cake soup that every Korean will have on New Year’s Day, which basically signifies that you’re one year older, because in Korea, you don’t go by your birthday. Everyone goes by the calendar year and ages together.”

At the same time she’s celebrating Korean culture, Kim focuses on having honest conversations with her kids about the realities of being a person of Asian descent in America.

In response to the March 2021 shootings in Atlanta, Kim sat down with her daughter to discuss what happened and talk about how she was feeling.

“I asked her how she felt, and she said that she was scared, which was very heartbreaking. You don’t ever want to feel like your child feels like they could be targeted because of their race.”

During that time of reflection, Kim adds that she acquired a deeper understanding of the pain of racism felt by the Black community in America for many generations.

“While friends and colleagues were reaching out to me, it also dawned on me that this was something that was, very sadly, too familiar to my Black friends and colleagues, and the Black community,” she says. “They have been having this conversation for generations. You know, I'm the first in my family to be talking about this to my child. Of course, there are other Asian families that have been having this discussion for generations. But to me, it was a very sad realization of how racism is still very alive and real.”

One of the ways that Kim is working to learn more about the impact of racism is through reading and reflection.

“What really kind of attracted me were all of these personal essays and stories about Asian Americans, especially women, who are becoming more comfortable in their own skin, and calling out behavior, like microaggressions.”

She notes that hearing examples of others actively calling out microaggressions helps her feel more confident addressing it in her own life. When she was recently grocery shopping, an employee was making conversation with Kim and her children, and began guessing their nationality.

“Normally, I might have not said anything, because I know he was just trying to be friendly,” she says. “But I could tell that my daughter was actually feeling a little bit uncomfortable. And I felt that I have to say something — she's here watching, this could be a teaching moment for her. So I told the gentleman that it's not polite to guess one's nationality, based on the way that they look. And, of course, he was very apologetic, and he was apologizing multiple times! And I just said, well, now you know. And I think those are little steps that I'm taking, and I'm hopeful that that will teach my kids how to handle those types of similar situations.”

As Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month comes to a close (Tech joins many universities in celebrating AAPI Heritage Month throughout April and its formally recognized month of May, so that students and our community can celebrate and gather before the spring semester ends), Kim encourages others to continue to practice kindness and inclusiveness.

“Take a moment to try to learn, or maybe have more openness in your heart, and try to be more inclusive. You know — we're all in this together. If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we are mere beings. Try to envision the world that you want your kids to be in, and those small acts of kindness that you can do.”

This story by Jason Maderer first appeared on Georgia Tech Research Horizons.

David Hu, professor of fluid mechanics in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, holds a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that elephants dilate their nostrils in order to create more space in their trunks, allowing them to store up to 5.5 liters of water. They can also suck up three liters per second — a speed 30 times faster than a human sneeze (150 meters per second/330 mph).

The Georgia Tech College of Engineering study sought to better understand the physics of how elephants use their trunks to move and manipulate air, water, food and other objects. They also sought to learn if the mechanics could inspire the creation of more efficient robots that use air motion to hold and move things.

While octopus use jets of water to move and archer fish shoot water above the surface to catch insects, the Georgia Tech researchers found that elephants are the only animals able to use suction on land and underwater.

The paper, “Suction feeding by elephants,” is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

“An elephant eats about 400 pounds of food a day, but very little is known about how they use their trunks to pick up lightweight food and water for 18 hours, every day,” said Georgia Tech mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Andrew Schulz, who led the study. “It turns out their trunks act like suitcases, capable of expanding when necessary.”

Schulz and the Georgia Tech team worked with veterinarians at Zoo Atlanta, studying elephants as they ate various foods. For large rutabaga cubes, for example, the animal grabbed and collected them. It sucked up smaller cubes and made a loud vacuuming sound, or the sound of a person slurping noodles, before transferring the vegetables to its mouth.

To learn more about suction, the researchers gave elephants a tortilla chip and measured the applied force. Sometimes the animal pressed down on the chip and breathed in, suspending the chip on the tip of trunk without breaking it. It was similar to a person inhaling a piece of paper onto their mouth. Other times the elephant applied suction from a distance, drawing the chip to the edge of its trunk.

“An elephant uses its trunk like a Swiss Army Knife,” said David Hu, Schulz’s advisor and a professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “It can detect scents and grab things. Other times it blows objects away like a leaf blower or sniffs them in like a vacuum.”

By watching elephants inhale liquid from an aquarium, the team was able to time the durations and measure volume. In just 1.5 seconds, the trunk sucked up 3.7 liters, the equivalent of 20 toilets flushing simultaneously.

An ultrasonic probe was used to take trunk wall measurements and see how the trunk’s inner muscles work. By contracting those muscles, the animal dilates its nostrils up to 30 percent. This decreases the thickness of the walls and expands nasal volume by 64 percent.

“At first it didn’t make sense: an elephant’s nasal passage is relatively small and it was inhaling more water than it should,” said Schulz. “It wasn’t until we saw the ultrasonographic images and watched the nostrils expand that we realized how they did it. Air makes the walls open, and the animal can store far more water than we originally estimated.”

Based on the pressures applied, Schulz and the team suggest that elephants inhale at speeds that are comparable to Japan’s 300-mph bullet trains.

Schulz said these unique characteristics have applications in soft robotics and conservation efforts.

“By investigating the mechanics and physics behind trunk muscle movements, we can apply the physical mechanisms — combinations of suction and grasping — to find new ways to build robots,” Schulz said. “In the meantime, the African elephant is now listed as endangered because of poaching and loss of habitat. Its trunk makes it a unique species to study. By learning more about them, we can learn how to better conserve elephants in the wild.”

The work was supported by the US Army Research Laboratory and the US Army Research Office 294 Mechanical Sciences Division, Complex Dynamics and Systems Program, under contract number 295 W911NF-12-R-0011. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the sponsoring agency.

Two interdisciplinary research teams have been awarded 2021 Petit Institute Seed Grants.

The program annually selects sets of researchers from the Petit Institute as co-principal investigators, providing early-stage funding opportunities that serve as a catalyst for bio-related breakthroughs.

The teams and their projects are:

Shu Jia (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University) and Alberto Stolfi (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) are working on a project called, “Super-Resolution Scanning Micros- copy for Studying Neuronal Cell Biology in vivo,” a new collaboration linking novel biological discovery and imaging technology. This project will transform existing imaging infrastructure, laying a critical intellectual foundation for broader science, engineering, and technology advances. 

Costas Arvanitis (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University) and Liang Han (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) submitted a project called, “Ultrasonic actuation of mechanosensitive ion channels.” This interdisciplinary team will explore new ways to balance and control sound and vibration and study how it interacts with cell membrane proteins. Their long-term goal is to advance research in the field of neurosciences through the discovery of new tools for noninvasive, focal, and at depth manipulation of brain activity.

The Petit Institute Seed Grants provide year-one funding of $50,000 with equivalent year-two funding contingent on submission of an NIH R21/R01 or similar collaborative grant proposal within 12 to 24 months of the year-one start date (July 1, 2021).

The inaugural class of seven Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) Scholars was recently selected for a 2-year program of working, studying, and training as an interdisciplinary sustainability research team. Launching in the Fall of 2021 with funding provided by a generous gift from Brook and Shawn Byers and guidance from a Faculty Advisory Board, the BBISS GRA Scholars will receive supplemental training in sustainability, team science, and leadership. They will apply their skills and talents, working directly with their peers, faculty, and external partners on a long-term, large team, sustainability relevant Vertically Integrated Project. They will participate in the organization and hosting of a seminar series in which they will invite and meet global leaders in sustainability, and they will have additional opportunities to develop professional networks, to publish, to draft proposals, to acquire knowledge, and to develop other skills critical to their professional success and relevant to their intellectual interests.

The first class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Graduate Research Assistant Scholars are:

  • Bettina Arkhurst - Ph.D. student, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
  • Katherine Duchesneau - Ph.D. student, School of Biological Sciences
  • Marjorie Hall - Ph.D. student in History of Technology, School of History and Sociology, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
  • Meaghan McSorley - Ph.D. student, School of City and Regional Planning, College of Design
  • Udita Ringania - Ph.D. student, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
  • Ioanna Maria Spyrou - Ph.D. student, School of Economics, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
  • Yilun 'Elon' Zha - Ph.D. student, School of Architecture, College of Design, and Master of Science candidate in statistics, Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, College of Engineering

The Faculty Advisory Board for the BBISS GRA Scholars is composed of the faculty who submitted the students' nominations. Nominations for Classes II and III of the BBISS GRA Scholars program will open in Spring 2022 and Spring 2023. It is expected that 6 to 8 scholars will be selected for each year’s group.

The Faculty Advisory Board for the inaugural class are:

Updates and outcomes will be posted to the BBISS website as the project progresses. Additional information is available at https://sustainable.gatech.edu/bbiss_gra_scholars.

For the past six years, multidisciplinary researchers from across the world have been probing northern Minnesota peat bogs in an unprecedented, long-range study of climate change supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. They set out to answer complex questions, including one big one – will future warming somehow release 10,000 years of accumulated carbon from peatlands that store a large portion of earth’s terrestrial carbon?

So the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) partnered with the USDA Forest Service to develop a one-of-its-kind field lab in the Marcel Experimental Forest, where below and above ground heating elements are gradually warming the bog in greenhouse-like enclosures big enough to include trees. The enclosures are roofless so that rain and snow can get in.

It’s called the SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments) experiment, and it was designed as a window into what would happen to peat bogs in a warmer world. A recent study, headed by Georgia Institute of Technology microbiologist Joel Kostka and published June 14 in the journal PNAS, provides a sobering outlook.

“The real concern and one of the major conclusions of this paper is that the ecosystem we’re studying is becoming more methanogenic,” said Kostka, professor and associate chair of research in the School of Biological Sciences, who holds a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and focuses on microbial ecology. “In other words, the warmed bog is enhancing the rate of methane production faster than that for carbon dioxide. This is what we think is going to happen in a warming world, based on our results.”

 

Testy Little Process

Methanogens are microbes that produce methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that traps up to 30 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Warming the peatland, the researchers found, basically creates a methane production line.

“This occurs because the plant community changes in response to warmer temperatures – mosses decrease and vascular plants increase,” said the paper’s lead author, Rachel Wilson, a researcher with Florida State University’s Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science, where she works in the lab of professor Jeff Chanton, co-author and co-principal investigator of the study.

The process forms a complete cycle: Vascular plants – shrubs and grass-like plants – produce more simple sugars, which are broken down by fermentative bacteria, and the breakdown products then fuel methane-producing microbes use to produce more methane.

While peatlands comprise just 3 percent of the Earth’s landmass, they store about one-third of the planet’s soil carbon. The thinking goes, as global temperatures rise, microbes could break into the carbon bank and the resulting decomposition of the ancient, combustible plant biomass would lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide and methane being released into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.

“Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide,” said Wilson. “Warming the climate stimulates methane production, which will contribute to more warming in a positive feedback loop.”

It’s a scenario that Chanton called, “a critical ecosystem shift. Peat soils that have been stable for thousands of years are giving up the ghost, so to speak. It’s a testy little process.”

 

Delayed Response

That unpleasant outcome is being delayed somewhat by the extreme conditions found in many peat bogs around the world, including at the SPRUCE experiment site.

“Although most peatlands are in northern regions undergoing some of the most rapid warming on the planet, we’re talking about generally cold, acidic soils where there’s no oxygen,” Kostka noted. “Methanogens grow really slowly under these extreme conditions. We do see their activity increasing with warming, but they’re not yet growing that fast.”

He has a good idea of what could happen, though. Several years ago, Kostka took soil samples from the Minnesota site and tested them in his lab at Georgia Tech, exaggerating the temperature to a much greater degree than would be possible in a large-scale experiment like SPRUCE.

Raising the temperature by 20 degrees Celsius, about twice the temperature range used in the field experiment, “we saw huge increases in methane and large changes in the microbes that break down soil carbon into greenhouse gases,” he said.

It's a sped-up version of what they’re seeing in the field where the research team, Kostka explained, “and it is just beginning to scratch the surface of the changes we’re seeing in this ecosystem.”

 

Next Chapter

The SPRUCE site experiment involves two kinds of treatment, warming and also elevated carbon dioxide. The warming treatment started in 2014. All of the data sets for the PNAS paper are from 2016. The elevated carbon dioxide treatment began in the final days of data collection, so it wasn’t particularly relevant for this study. “Going forward, we’re thinking the effects of elevated carbon dioxide will be one potential future story to tell,” Kostka said. “This is a long-term experiment and many of these large scale climate change field experiments do not observe substantial changes to microbial communities until 10 years after they start.”

Ultimately, SPRUCE experimental activity is designed and intended to develop a quantitative mechanistic understanding of carbon cycling processes, according to Paul Hanson, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientist leading the long-range project as principal investigator.

“SPRUCE provides experimental insights for a broad range of plausible future warming conditions for an established peatland ecosystem, combined with or without elevated carbon dioxide,” Hanson said.

So far, the evidence is pointing to a grim possibility: Warming enhances the production of carbon substrates from plants, stimulating microbial activity and greenhouse gas production, possibly leading to amplified climate-peatland feedbacks. Think, gasoline on a fire.

“That would be the worst case scenario,” Kostka said. “We don’t really know yet how plants and microbes will exchange carbon and nutrients in a warmer world. Will that carbon be locked up by the plants and stored in the soil? Will it be respired by microbes and released as a gas?

 We are just beginning to see major changes in the microbes and plants at the SPRUCE peatland.  Although the first few years of the experiment indicate that a lot more methane will be released to the atmosphere, we will be looking to see if these changes are sustained over the long term.”

 

CITATIONS:  Rachel M. Wilson, Malak M. Tfaily, Max Kolton, Eric Johnston, Caitlin Petro, Cassandra A. Zalman, Paul J. Hanson, Heino M. Heyman, Jennifer E. Kyle, David W. Hoyt, Elizabeth K. Eder, Samuel O. Purvine, Randy K. Kolka, Stephen D. Sebestyen, Natalie A. Griffiths, Christopher W. Schadt, Jason K. Keller, Scott D. Bridgham, and Jeffrey P. Chanton, and Joel E. Kostka.  “Soil metabolome response to whole ecosystem warming at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments experiment” (PNAS, June 2021) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004192118

AERIAL PHOTO: Hanson, P.J., M.B. Krassovski, and L.A. Hook. 2020. SPRUCE S1 Bog and SPRUCE Experiment Aerial Photographs. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TES SFA, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/spruce.012 (UAV image number 0050 collected on October 4, 2020).

 

RELATED LINKS:

“Soil metabolome response to whole ecosystem warming at the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments experiment” 

Joel Kostka – Microbial Ecology

SPRUCE Experiment

“Shaking a Sleeping Bog Monster” (Research Horizons)

NSF Supports Research on the Microbes in Peat Moss

ScienceMatters Podcast: Digging Up Climate Clues in Peat Moss

At the first ever CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics, held on June 10, 2021, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection at Georgia Tech (CMDI) came together virtually to discuss ecological and evolutionary perspectives on infectious disease dynamics.

“The mission of the CMDI is to transform the study and the sustainable control of microbial dynamics in contexts of human and environmental health,” notes Sam Brown, director of CMDI and professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. “In keeping with this work, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics brought together these scientists as neighbors in Atlanta, and as organizations committed to the research of disease prevention and control.”

“In addition to showcasing the overlapping research interests of the CMDI and the CDC, the symposium also offered members of the Georgia Tech and CDC communities an open platform to ask questions of researchers in real time, as well as an opportunity to make new connections and encourage collaboration,” says Jennifer Farrell, a Ph.D. student studying microbiology at Georgia Tech who helped organize the meeting.

Farrell shares:

The online symposium drew 178 participants from across Georgia Tech and the CDC, setting the stage for continued communication and collaboration between the two institutions. The day kicked off with opening remarks from Brown and Juliana Cyril, director of the Office of Technology and Innovation, Office of Science, CDC.  Cyril and Brown each highlighted the unique relationships and collaborative potential between the two organizations.

Talks spanned pathogen systems, from the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Streptococcus pneumoniae (Rich Stanton and Davina Campbell, CDC; Pengbo Cao, CMDI; Bernie Beall, CDC), to colonization dynamics of the fungal pathogen, Candida auris (Joe Sexton, CDC), to shield immunity in SARS-CoV-2 (Adriana Lucia-Sans and Andreea Magalie, CMDI).

Talks were further divided into research themes such as biofilm control (Pablo Bravo, CMDI; Rodney Donlan, CDC; Sheyda Azimi, CMDI) and microbiomes in infection (Commander Alison Laufer-Halpin, CDC; Jennifer Farrell, CMDI).

“In line with the commitment of the CMDI to promote trainee career development, the CMDI-CDC Meeting on Infectious Disease Dynamics was organized and run by Center graduate students and post-doctoral scientists, and CMDI talks were presented exclusively by Center trainees,” adds Farrell. “We look forward to continuing the conversation with our CDC colleagues in the future!”

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