Scientists have long thought that there was a direct connection between the rise in atmospheric oxygen, which started with the Great Oxygenation Event 2.5 billion years ago, and the rise of large, complex multicellular organisms.
That theory, the “Oxygen Control Hypothesis,” suggests that the size of these early multicellular organisms was limited by the depth to which oxygen could diffuse into their bodies. The hypothesis makes a simple prediction that has been highly influential within both evolutionary biology and geosciences: Greater atmospheric oxygen should always increase the size to which multicellular organisms can grow.
It’s a hypothesis that’s proven difficult to test in a lab. Yet a team of Georgia Tech researchers found a way — using directed evolution, synthetic biology, and mathematical modeling — all brought to bear on a simple multicellular lifeform called a ‘snowflake yeast’. The results? Significant new information on the correlations between oxygenation of the early Earth and the rise of large multicellular organisms — and it’s all about exactly how much O2 was available to some of our earliest multicellular ancestors.
“The positive effect of oxygen on the evolution of multicellularity is entirely dose-dependent — our planet's first oxygenation would have strongly constrained, not promoted, the evolution of multicellular life,” explains G. Ozan Bozdag, research scientist in the School of Biological Sciences and the study’s lead author. “The positive effect of oxygen on multicellular size may only be realized when it reaches high levels.”
“Oxygen suppression of macroscopic multicellularity” is published in the May 14, 2021 edition of the journal Nature Communications. Bozdag’s co-authors on the paper include Georgia Tech researchers Will Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Rozenn Pineau, Ph.D. student in the School of Biological Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS); along with Eric Libby, assistant professor at Umea University in Sweden and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.
Directing yeast to evolve in record time
“We show that the effect of oxygen is more complex than previously imagined. The early rise in global oxygen should in fact strongly constrain the evolution of macroscopic multicellularity, rather than selecting for larger and more complex organisms,” notes Ratcliff.
“People have long believed that the oxygenation of Earth's surface was helpful — some going so far as to say it is a precondition — for the evolution of large, complex multicellular organisms,” he adds. “But nobody has ever tested this directly, because we haven't had a model system that is both able to undergo lots of generations of evolution quickly, and able to grow over the full range of oxygen conditions,” from anaerobic conditions up to modern levels.
The researchers were able to do that, however, with snowflake yeast, simple multicellular organisms capable of rapid evolutionary change. By varying their growth environment, they evolved snowflake yeast for over 800 generations in the lab with selection for larger size.
The results surprised Bozdag. “I was astonished to see that multicellular yeast doubled their size very rapidly when they could not use oxygen, while populations that evolved in the moderately oxygenated environment showed no size increase at all,” he says. “This effect is robust — even over much longer timescales.”
Size — and oxygen levels — matter for multicellular growth
In the team’s research, “large size easily evolved either when our yeast had no oxygen or plenty of it, but not when oxygen was present at low levels,” Ratcliff says. “We did a lot more work to show that this is actually a totally predictable and understandable outcome of the fact that oxygen, when limiting, acts as a resource — if cells can access it, they get a big metabolic benefit. When oxygen is scarce, it can't diffuse very far into organisms, so there is an evolutionary incentive for multicellular organisms to be small — allowing most of their cells access to oxygen — a constraint that is not there when oxygen simply isn't present, or when there's enough of it around to diffuse more deeply into tissues.”
Ratcliff says not only does his group’s work challenge the Oxygen Control Hypothesis, it also helps science understand why so little apparent evolutionary innovation was happening in the world of multicellular organisms in the billion years after the Great Oxygenation Event. Ratcliff explains that geologists call this period the “Boring Billion” in Earth’s history — also known as the Dullest Time in Earth's History, and Earth's Middle Ages — a period when oxygen was present in the atmosphere, but at low levels, and multicellular organisms stayed relatively small and simple.
Bozdag adds another insight into the unique nature of the study. “Previous work examined the interplay between oxygen and multicellular size mainly through the physical principles of gas diffusion,” he says. “While that reasoning is essential, we also need an inclusive consideration of principles of Darwinian evolution when studying the origin of complex multicellular life on our planet.” Finally being able to advance organisms through many generations of evolution helped the researchers accomplish just that, Bozdag adds.
This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant no. DEB-1845363 to W.C.R, NSF grant no. IOS-1656549 to W.C.R., NSF grant no. IOS-1656849 to E.L., and a Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering to W.C.R. C.T.R. and W.C.R. acknowledge funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Earth’s average surface temperature has risen approximately 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s — most of that rise in the past 40 years, according to NASA. That’s due in large part to the increase of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, caused by human activity. This has led oceans to warm, ice sheets to melt, and sea levels to rise faster — and it has accelerated the frequency of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes.
When it comes to facing these challenges, “It’s all hands — and all solutions — on deck,” says Susan Lozier, dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech and president of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "While we as scientists continue to embrace discovery science, we need to more fully embrace solution space."
Georgia Tech faculty across a number of disciplines are working on projects in ocean science and engineering aimed at identifying, projecting, mitigating, and even reversing the effects of climate change. Many of these researchers are doing so in conjunction with Georgia Tech’s Ocean Science and Engineering (OSE) program and its founding director, Emanuele “Manu” Di Lorenzo, professor of ocean and climate dynamics.
Though the OSE program is relatively new — accepting its first students in 2017 — it has attracted attention for its ability to coordinate and integrate the ocean systems work being done at Georgia Tech and beyond to solve significant problems. “There is a new cohort of people who are needed — problem-solvers of Earth climate, and this involves the ocean,” Di Lorenzo says. “Our hope is that through the OSE program, we will provide students with the tools and the knowledge and resources to be active players as new ocean leaders. This goes beyond them being researchers.”
In 2014, when Adam Decker started teaching the anatomy lab and lecture course BIOS 3753 in the School of Biological Sciences, he and his students relied on printed anatomy diagrams and plastic models of organs to understand the human body. Decker knew that many of his pre-health students would soon be on their way to medical schools elsewhere — and he worried that these undergrad classes would pale in comparison to what they’d later encounter as graduate students with more hands-on experiences.
“It just didn’t get the punch across like I wanted — for having the students know what a heart feels like in their hands, what a lung feels like,” says Decker, a senior academic professional in Biological Sciences at Tech. “Pieces of plastic are fine, and they serve a purpose — but it’s not the real deal like they would see in grad school.”
Student evaluations of his course would occasionally echo those same sentiments. Why couldn’t neuroscience students study an actual human brain to better understand how it works?
Those evaluations led Decker to explore how he could bring human cadaveric specimens and organs to Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus for his students to study. The feedback from students now learning anatomy from those specimens is clear — Decker’s lab and course are among some of the fastest growing classes in the School, with students from a variety of disciplines showing interest — such as a biomedical engineering major who wants to design heart valves and is looking for hands-on experience, and an aspiring physician-astronaut “carving my own path to advance the intersections between medicine, engineering, and space exploration” as a dual major in biology and industrial engineering, with dual minors in social justice and physiology.
A related special topics course in pathology started by Decker could soon be a permanent addition to the School of Biological Sciences curriculum, with a growing base of young alumni who share that they’re now deciding on specialties in medical school based on their experiences in his classes.
“We are so lucky to have Adam as an instructor at Georgia Tech,” says Michael (Mike) Goodisman, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “Adam has great reviews from the students in his classes. They can see how passionate he is about understanding human form and function. These are very difficult classes — but the students love them. And Adam is always trying to provide the most contemporary and exciting class experience possible.”
“This was the first time these specimens have been brought to campus,” Decker says. “The human side of our biology curriculum is really growing here. I’m just grateful to have had a part in that, developing courses and helping satisfy that need. It’s an exciting time to be in pre-health here.”
Adopting a new approach to anatomy
Creating these immersive courses took time, Decker says. His path to bringing cadaveric specimens to Georgia Tech involved two years of advocacy— phone calls, meetings, and negotiations with groups split across Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Medicine, along with teaming up with fellow School of Biological Sciences professors who supported the collaborative effort for campus.
Back in 2018, Decker signed up to teach with Georgia Tech’s Pacific Study Abroad Program, through which students travel to New Zealand and Australia for courses and cultural experiences. Decker was leading the Scientific Foundations of Health (APPH/BIOL1040) class there, and says the trip helped him decide to look at adding cadaver classes and labs to curriculum offerings back at Tech’s Atlanta campus.
On the south island of New Zealand, he explains, the University of Otago in Dunedin has a medical school with a popular Anatomy Museum, “where you could go in and they have all the prosections (specimens that demonstrate anatomic structure for students), all the cadaver organs, sections of tissues and bones, and anything you could think of related to the human body,” he says, “and it was open to the public.”
After peppering the curator with questions about the process of obtaining and hosting specimens, “I started thinking that there’s no reason we can’t do this back home. We don’t have a medical school — but Emory is right down the road.”
When he returned to Atlanta, Decker connected with colleagues at Emory University to see how cadaveric-based curricula might be made available at Georgia Tech, launching a multi-year effort with detailed requirements, and logistics — and a unique philanthropic program.
A team from Emory inspected the anatomy lab space on Tech’s campus, in a recently renovated building where courses and labs were planned. The group inquired about security arrangements, and laid down detailed rules and logistics for things like storage temperature, transportation, and appropriate humidity levels for specimens.
Regarding that last stipulation: Decker also happens to be a licensed embalmer in the state of Georgia. “I’m the guy who can keep the specimens preserved, and where they need to be, as far as preservation goes, and not pose a public health risk to the community. Emory liked that.”
The university also offered to help through a very unique philanthropic initiative — the Emory Body Donation Program. Decker explains that some of the cadaveric specimens that Emory and Tech’s future doctors, nurses, researchers, and founders study are thanks to generous individuals — often alumni — who, as the program notes, “wish to be useful to the living after death. We all cannot endow a hospital or establish a clinic, but each of us has the opportunity to make one valuable gift to medical science - the gift of his or her body after death.”
“This was something new for the school, I know,” Decker shares. “But the semesters were rolling by and students were missing the opportunity — because we were hung up” with finalizing paperwork and agreements across Emory and Tech.
So Decker reached out to his colleague Mike Goodisman, who made some calls and arranged a phone conference with both universities. The remaining questions and legal considerations were soon resolved, and Decker was invited to Emory to conduct dissections for the cadavers and specimens he would bring back to Georgia Tech.
“They left me with twenty cadavers. I was able to get multiple hearts and lungs, entire gastrointestinal tracts, brains, and a spinal cord,” he explains. “It took me seven hours to get the brain and spinal cord in one section — that specimen has proven valuable to the neuroscience majors. They want to see everything in one piece. These are really unique things that get the students excited.”
Student reaction, and respect for the specimens
Studying human hearts allows students to trace blood flow, something they could begin to learn from plastic models, but “it’s nothing like holding the real thing, and being able to trace the actual blood flow. It’s an amazing experience they get to have with this.”
That experience has prompted some graduates of Decker’s classes to even change their medical school plans. “Now they’re telling me they want to go into cardiology. They’re choosing a specialty because of this — and that’s the best experience, when you get them excited about something and they want to devote themselves to it.”
That energy is reflected in class attendance. The first human anatomy class Decker taught in 2014 had 66 students. In fall 2020, even with Covid-19, he had close to 295 students. “This is an upper elective 3000-level course. It’s almost unheard of to have almost 300 students.”
His senior-level human pathology course kicked off in 2019 as a special topic elective with 33 students. Decker is now running it for the second time, and has enrolled nearly 100 students.
“Dr. Decker has really done a great service to the students of Georgia Tech in bringing this course to life, so to speak,” says Young-Hui Chang, professor and associate chair for Faculty Development in the School of Biological Sciences. “He has worked incredibly hard to get us to the point where we can offer a unique cadaver-based human anatomy course to our undergraduate students. In particular, the students who have ambitions for a variety of health-related careers really benefit from this unique experience of learning from real human anatomy — and to learn it under the guidance of a truly gifted anatomist and teacher in Adam Decker.”
As to how students react to seeing specimens for the first time? “They’re usually very silent. Everybody is sitting down, nobody was talking. There’s almost a reverence you feel — as there should be. I tell them that this person loved somebody, lost somebody, went to school. You need to hold these specimens and have that reverence for them. These were people, and they’ve given the gift of themselves to help you learn.”
New technology applied to an ancient practice
Decker adds that anatomy is “pretty old school,” pointing out that dissections and naming of the body’s structures occurred in the 1500s. “Anatomy is a very old science, but it’s actually the basis of all health care. It’s the first course medical students take before they become doctors or nurses. You have to know what’s normal anatomy before you know what’s abnormal.”
Decker also wants to complement his anatomy and pathology courses by adding some new technology to traditional offerings. For instance, a California-based company, Anatomage, makes what it calls a virtual dissection table — essentially a typical human cadaver in digital form. A seven-foot-long “operating table” is basically a large flat screen with an image of a cadaver. By touching the screen, students can “cut away” tissue. Body parts are annotated, “so everything is labeled. It’s amazing. That’s where a lot of this is headed.”
Decker says Stanford University School of Medicine is now using the tables, and he’s put in a budget request in hopes of adding two of these tables to Tech’s campus.
In the meantime, he hopes to optimize storage and specifications so that students can work more directly with the specimens. Decker knows that his students would be ready to take on the challenge. “My anatomy class is not a typical undergrad course. It’s more of ‘one foot in medical school content, one foot in undergrad.’ It’s pretty intense, but I feel confident they will do well — and they always do.”
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).
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