Cancer chemotherapy has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years with traditional treatments like broad-spectrum cytotoxic agents being complemented or replaced by drugs that target specific genes believed to drive the onset and progression of the disease.

This more personalized approach to chemotherapy became possible when genomic profiling of individual patient tumors led researchers to identify specific "cancer driver genes" that, when mutated or abnormally expressed, led to the onset and development of cancer.

Different types of cancer — like lung cancer versus breast cancer — and, to some extent, different patients diagnosed with the same cancer type — show variations in the cancer driver genes believed to be responsible for disease onset and progression. “For example, the therapeutic drug Herceptin is commonly used to treat breast cancer patients when its target gene, HER-2, is found to be over-expressed,” says John F. McDonald, professor in the School of Biological Sciences.

McDonald explains that, currently, the identification of potential targets for gene therapy relies almost exclusively on genomic analyses of tumors that identify cancer driver genes that are significantly over-expressed.

But in their latest study, McDonald and Bioinformatics Ph.D. student Zainab Arshad have found that another important class of genetic changes may be happening in places where scientists don’t normally look: the network of gene-gene interactions associated with cancer onset and progression.

“Genes and the proteins they encode do not operate in isolation from one another,” McDonald says. “Rather, they communicate with one another in a highly integrated network of interactions.”

“What I think is most remarkable about our findings is that the vast majority of changes — more than 90% — in the network of interactions accompanying cancer are not associated with genes displaying changes in their expression,” adds Arshad, co-author of the paper. “What this means is that genes playing a central role in bringing about changes in network structure associated with cancer — the ‘hub genes’ — may be important new targets for gene therapy that can go undetected by gene expression analyses.”

Their research paper “Changes in gene-gene interactions associated with cancer onset and progression are largely independent of changes in gene expression” is published in the journal iScience.

Mutations, expression — and changes in network structure

In the study, Arshad and McDonald worked with samples of brain, thyroid, breast, lung adenocarcinoma, lung squamous cell carcinoma, skin, kidney, ovarian, and acute myeloid leukemia cancers — and they noticed differences in cell network structure for each of these cancers as they progressed from early to later stages.

When early-stage cancers develop, and stayed confined to their body tissue of origin, they noted a reduction in network complexity relative to normal pre-cursor cells. Normal, healthy cells are highly differentiated, but as they transition to cancer, “[T]hey go through a process of de-differentiation to a more primitive or stem cell-like state. It’s known from developmental biology that as cells transition from early embryonic stem cells to highly specialized fully differentiated cells, network complexity increases. What we see in the transition from normal to early-stage cancers is a reversal of this process,” McDonald explains.

McDonald says as the cancers progress to advanced stages, when they can spread or metastasize to other parts of the body, “[W]e observe re-establishment of high levels of network complexity, but the genes comprising the complex networks associated with advanced cancers are quite different from those comprising the complex networks associated with the precursor normal tissues.”

“As cancers evolve in function, they are typically associated with changes in DNA structure, and/or with changes in the RNA expression of cancer driver genes. Our results indicate that there’s an important third class of changes going on — changes in gene interactions — and many of these changes are not detectable if all you’re looking for are changes in gene expression.”

 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.103522

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the Mark Light Integrated Cancer Research Center Student Fellowship , the Deborah Nash Endowment Fund , and the Ovarian Cancer Institute (Atlanta), where John F. McDonald serves as chief research officer. The results shown here are based upon data generated by the TCGA Research Network: http://cancergenome.nih.gov/.

 

About Georgia Institute of Technology

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.

 

Black soldier fly larvae devour food waste and other organic matter and are made of 60% protein, making them an attractive sustainable food source in agriculture. But increasingly, black soldier larvae are dying before they reach livestock facilities as animal feed. 

Georgia Tech researchers, recognizing the culprit is the collective heat generated when the maggots eat in crowded conditions, have found that delivering the right amount of airflow could help solve the overheating issue. Their findings were published this month in Frontiers in Physics as part of a special issue on the “Physics of Social Interactions.”

“Black soldier fly larvae are widely used in an emerging food-recycling industry. The idea is to feed the larvae with food waste and then turn them into chicken feed,” explained first author Hungtang Ko, a Ph.D. student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.  “These larvae make a great candidate for this process because they eat just about everything.”

Each year humans waste more than one billion tons of food, or a third of all food production, and many countries are running out of options for disposing of this waste.

The larvae thrive in and around compost piles, where their larvae help break down organic material, from rotten produce to animal remains and manure. Black soldier fly larvae commonly grow to about 1,000 times their size, noted David Hu, professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering.

“It’s like going from the size of a person to the size of a big truck,” he said of the larvae’s growth from eggs to adults.

Hu has appeared on Science Friday graphically showing the voracious appetite of black soldier fly larvae, which can eat twice their body mass in food per day. But when these maggots feed while tightly packed in container bins, they generate metabolic heat that collectively can turn lethal for them.

Air Flow Matters

Ko and Hu collaborated with Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, to set up the experiments. Goldman uses fluidized beds —widely used in industrial applications like oil refining ― to control properties of granular media in animal and robot locomotion studies. Fluidized beds operate by forcing a vertical flow of fluid through a collection of particulate matter; above a certain flow rate, the grains transition from a solid pile to a fluid-like arrangement, where they collide and jostle.  

The researchers placed the larvae in a container subjected to regular air flow at a consistent temperature. They then attached a leaf blower to supply air flow into the chamber, manually ramping up and down the air speed in five-minute trials.

Because of the larvae’s constant activity, the collectives’ behavior under air fluidization differs from what is observed in traditional fluidized beds: larvae were un-jammable when air flow became low. Instead, they behave like a fluid that adapted and adjusted to external forces.

“An interesting aspect of this work is that it probes a regime of ‘active matter,’ which has received less attention from physicists: Instead of 3D swarms composed of widely separated, non-colliding flying birds and insects, our `swarm’ exists in another regime, where animals are packed tightly together,” Goldman said.

In a second experiment, the team used x-ray imaging and constant air speed to see how fast larvae eat. Specifically, Ko measured the average velocity and pressure of the larvae, as well as how much food they ate under various airflow speeds.

“As you continue to increase the flow, you’ll reach a point where all the larvae are flying [through the air]. The airflow is too fast, and they won’t eat well,” he said.   

Optimal air velocity will ensure the larvae are cooled off properly and can still feed effectively. “Probing optimal flow velocity will be a good next step. Also, from an engineering perspective, we need to consider other ways that we can cool the larvae down, including using heat transfer,” he added. 

The results indicated that as larvae are agitated by rapid flows, the insects are more likely to be suspended in mid-air without contacting the food, suggesting that a moderate flow rate would be optimal for feeding dense groups of larvae.

The researchers also hope this work will enable black soldier fly larvae to be more readily available as recyclers of food waste, which totals 1.3 billion tons per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. But just as important is the potential of these protein-rich insects to reduce the carbon effects of feeding animals. Global food production contributes more than 17 billion metric tons of human-made greenhouse gas emissions every year, according to a study published in September in Nature Food. Animal-based foods produce more than twice the emissions of plant-based food, the study found. 

“There's no sustainable protein source for the animals that we eat,” noted Ko. “The black soldier fly larvae could play a role in reducing the environmental impact of feeding these animals.”

CITATION: H. Ko, et. all, “Air-Fluidized Aggregates of Black Soldier Fly Larvae,” (Frontiers in Physics, 2021) https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2021.734447

As of this week, the omicron variant makes up the majority of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. Omicron is more contagious than previous variants and has caused a spike in cases across the nation, including locally.

The same prevention measures that have been put in place previously can still help slow the spread of this variant — vaccination, wearing a face covering, physical distancing, and regular surveillance testing. A well-fitting mask with good filtration is a strong defense for when you are out in public, even if you are fully vaccinated.

As the campus community looks toward winter break, Georgia Tech encourages all students, faculty, and staff to get fully vaccinated, including a booster shot. Campus vaccination clinics will resume in January; to find a vaccination site before that, visit vaccines.gov. Vaccines help reduce the risk of severe illness and hospitalization.

Anyone with Covid-19 symptoms — even mild ones — should get tested and wait for a negative result before interacting with others. Testing on campus is closed through winter break and will resume Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2022. Until then, you can find an alternate testing site.

We recommend all students, faculty, and staff plan to get tested off-campus before returning for the spring semester, and we recommend each person test again on campus upon their return. Campus testing sites will reopen at full capacity on Jan. 4th to accommodate those returning to campus.

Jenny McGuire plans to use the late Cenozoic fossil record in Africa — a span of 7.5 million years — to study the long-term relationships between animals, their traits, and how they respond to changes in their environments. The goal is to use the data to forecast future changes and help inform conservation biology decisions for the continent.

McGuire, an assistant professor with joint appointments in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, and her Spatial Ecology & Paleontology Lab are teaming up with an international cohort of researchers for the effort, which includes scientists from Texas A&M University, University of Cambridge, and the National Museums of Kenya. The work is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (US NSF) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC), part of UK Research & Innovation (UKRI), a new body which works in partnership with universities, research organizations, businesses, charities and government “to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish.”

McGuire says the team hopes to learn more about which functional traits vertebrates (animals with backbones) have that closely relate to shifting factors at a given location like temperature, rain and other precipitation, and their natural environment — and how those changes have occurred as environments and humans evolved.

“Community-level trait calculations correlate with specific environmental conditions,” McGuire says. “For example, in places or times when there is less precipitation, mammal communities overall will have more robust, rugged, resistant teeth. And the ankle gear ratios of mammals living in open versus more enclosed habitats reflect this condition, since animals living in more open habitats typically need to run faster.”

McGuire says Africa offers a crucial natural laboratory for these types of conservation paleobiological studies, noting a rich, well-sampled fossil record. The continent is also home to a diverse range of vertebrate ecosystems, including the most complete natural community of remaining terrestrial megafauna: large animals that include the “big five” of Africa — elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines like wildebeests, antelopes, and water buffaloes.

“Critically, these megafauna are facing increasing pressures from global economic demands leading to habitat loss, as well as from changing climates,” McGuire shares.

Michelle Lawing, an associate professor in Texas A&M’s Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, is the lead institution principal investigator for the project, and McGuire is the collaborating institution’s principal investigator. Fredrick Kyalo Manthi, co-principal investigator, is director of Antiquities, Sites, and Monuments and a senior research scientist in the Department of Earth Sciences at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. Jason Head, NERC principal investigator, is a professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

Responding to changing climates and environments

Related research into how communities have evolved over time, and how they’ve been impacted by terrain, animal migration, and climate change, has taken McGuire to Wyoming’s Natural Trap Cave for five of the past seven summers. There, the so-called “pit” or sinkhole cave trapped animals for millennia, leaving only their bones and other fossils remaining to tell their stories to McGuire and fellow researchers about life there more than 35,000 years ago.

“What we’re really looking at is how communities shift across the landscape,” McGuire shared in an earlier interview about the work. “So, if we have glaciers that are coming really far south in North America, how does that drive the distributions of species on the landscape and where they’re living, and whether or not there’s new communities or total remixing of communities, or if communities just shift in a uniform way?

“We’re really trying to understand how animals respond to changing climate and changing environments, so that we can get a better sense of how they’ll respond to increased warming and climate change that’s occurring today.”

Positive trait to environment relationships — and a negative one

When it comes to an example of a good trait-environment relationship involving animals, McGuire cites the role that elephants play in Africa — something mastodons also did in North America before their extinction.

“Elephants help maintain savanna habitats,” McGuire says, referring to the giants’ relationships with Africa’s grassland regions. “They control trees along the perimeters of forests, preventing them from expanding into, and taking over, savanna habitats.”

Similarly, in ancient North American ecosystems, the loss of the mammoth, along with climate change, is thought to have resulted in the loss of the mammoth steppe ecosystem, “a no-analog, widespread Arctic shrubland that went extinct as a biome (a community of plants and animals) around the time of North American megafauna extinction,” McGuire says.

The new project’s outreach efforts

The US NSF and UK NERC funding for the project also includes student outreach and mentoring for early career academics. The project’s broader impact goals include measures to support inclusivity and diversity in science, high-impact training experiences for students and postdoctoral researchers, application of the researcher’s modeling framework for applied conservation, and meaningful engagement with the public.

“This international collaborative project will also help train both Kenyan and American (and) European students, thus establishing another generation of researchers,” National Museums of Kenya’s Fredrick Kyalo Manthi says.

“We plan to pair travel and research objectives with workshops so that workshop students get to directly participate in research, and serve as co-authors on projects as appropriate,” McGuire adds.

***

Funding: NSFDEB-NERC Award #2124770; NSF CAREER Award #1945013; International Union of Biological Sciences: Conservation Paleobiology in Africa Program.

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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 44,000 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.

Severe and persistent disability often undermines the life-saving benefits of cancer treatment. Pain and fatigue — together with sensory, motor, and cognitive disorders — are chief among the constellation of side effects that occur with the platinum-based agents used widely in chemotherapy treatments worldwide.

A new study by Georgia Tech researchers in the lab of Timothy C. Cope has found a novel pathway for understanding why these debilitating conditions happen for cancer patients and why scientists should focus on all of the possible neural processes that deliver sensory or motor problems to a patient’s brain — including the central nervous system — and not just the “peripheral degeneration of sensory neurons” that occurs away from the center of the body.

The new findings “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment” are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and could impact development of effective treatments that are not yet available for restoring a patient’s normal abilities to receive and process sensory input as part of post cancer treatment, in particular.

Stephen N. (Nick) Housley, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences, the Integrated Cancer Research Center, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, is the study’s lead author. Co-authors include Paul Nardelli, research scientist and Travis Rotterman, postdoctoral fellow (both of the School of Biological Sciences), along with Timothy Cope, who serves as a professor with joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech and in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech.

Neurologic consequences

“Chemotherapy undoubtedly negatively influences the peripheral nervous system, which is often viewed as the main culprit of neurologic disorders during cancer treatment,” shares Housley. However, he says, for the nervous system to operate normally, both the peripheral and central nervous system must cooperate.

“This occurs through synaptic communication between neurons. Through an elegant series of studies, we show that those hubs of communication in the central nervous system are also vulnerable to cancer treatment’s adverse effects,” Housley shares, adding that the findings force “recognition of the numerous places throughout the nervous system that we have to treat if we ever want to fix the neurological consequences of cancer treatment — because correcting any one may not be enough to improve human function and quality of life.”

“These disabilities remain clinically unmitigated and empirically unexplained as research concentrates on peripheral degeneration of sensory neurons,” the research team explains in the study, “while understating the possible involvement of neural processes within the central nervous system. The present findings demonstrate functional defects in the fundamental properties of information processing localized within the central nervous system,” concluding that “long-lasting sensorimotor and possibly other disabilities induced by cancer treatment result from independent neural defects compounded across both peripheral and central nervous systems.”

Sensorimotor disabilities and ‘cOIN’

The research team notes that cancer survivors “rank sensorimotor disability among the most distressing, long-term consequences of chemotherapy. Disorders in gait, balance, and skilled movements are commonly assigned to chemotoxic damage of peripheral sensory neurons without consideration of the deterministic role played by the neural circuits that translate sensory information into movement,” adding that this oversight “precludes sufficient, mechanistic understanding and contributes to the absence of effective treatment for reversing chemotherapy-induced disability.”

Cope says the team resolved this omission “through the use of a combination of electrophysiology, behavior, and modeling to study the operation of a spinal sensorimotor circuit in vivo” in a rodent model of “chronic, oxaliplatin (chemotherapy)–induced neuropathy: cOIN.”

Key sequential events were studied in the encoding of “propriosensory” information (think kinesthesia: the body's ability to sense its location, movements, and actions) and its circuit translation into the synaptic potentials produced in motoneurons.

In the “cOIN” rats, the team noted multiple classes of propriosensory neurons expressed defective firing that reduced accurate sensory representation of muscle mechanical responses to stretch, adding that accuracy “degraded further in the translation of propriosensory signals into synaptic potentials as a result of defective mechanisms residing inside the spinal cord.”

Joint expression, independent defects

“These sequential, peripheral, and central defects compounded to drive the sensorimotor circuit into a functional collapse that was consequential in predicting the significant errors in propriosensory-guided movement behaviors demonstrated here in our rat model and reported for people with cOIN,” Cope and Housley report. “We conclude that sensorimotor disability induced by cancer treatment emerges from the joint expression of independent defects occurring in both peripheral and central elements of sensorimotor circuits.”

“These findings have broad impact on the scientific field and on clinical management of neurologic consequences of cancer treatment,” Housley says. “As both a clinician and scientist, I can envision the urgent need to jointly develop quantitative clinical tests that have the capacity to identify which parts of a patient nervous system are impacted by their cancer treatment.”

Housley also says that having the capacity to monitor neural function across various sites during the course of treatment “will provide a biomarker on which we can optimize treatment — e.g. maximize anti-neoplastic effects while minimizing the adverse effects,” adding that, as we move into the next generation cancer treatments, “clinical tests that can objectively monitor specific aspects of the nervous system will be exceptionally important to test for the presence off-target effect.”

 

***

FUNDING: This work is supported by NIH Grants R01CA221363 and R01HD090642 and the Northside Hospital Foundation, Inc.

DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100428118

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The researchers thank Marc Binder (Department of Physiology & Biophysics at University of Washington) and Todd Streelman (School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech) for providing useful discussions and comments on a preliminary version of the manuscript. Lead author Housley also serves as chief scientific officer for Motus Nova, a healthcare robotics and technology company.

***

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 44,000 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.

Because humans and animals breathe and metabolize oxygen, they generate a variety of reactive oxygen species (ROS), or cell-damaging oxidants, as byproducts. Our bodies usually make enough antioxidants to counter that damage, but when that balance starts to favor oxidants, they can attack important biomolecules like proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. That can lead to cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and cardiovascular diseases.

Fortunately, our bodies evolved to produce antioxidant enzymes such as Cu/Zn (copper/zinc) superoxide dismutase, or SOD1, which detoxifies certain harmful oxidants. In a weird twist, SOD1 is the only antioxidant enzyme that can take on one specific oxidant, superoxide, only to produce another ROS: hydrogen peroxide.

A team of Georgia Tech researchers have published a study that found an even stranger twist to this oxidant-antioxidant tale: SOD1 (good for cells) produces hydrogen peroxide (bad for cells) which stimulates the production of another important cellular antioxidant known as NADPH (also good for cells; more on this in a moment.)

“Yes, you heard that right,” says Amit Reddi, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “SOD1, an antioxidant enzyme, produces an oxidant, hydrogen peroxide, which in turn stimulates the production of another (good) antioxidant.”

Reddi is a co-author of this research along with Matthew Torres, associate professor in the School of Biological SciencesClaudia Montllor-Albalate, former Reddi Lab member who received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Hyojung Kim, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Ph.D. candidate; Annalise Thompson, a third-year graduate student in Reddi’s lab; and Alex Jonke, research scientist with the School of Biological Sciences. 

Their study, “SOD1 Integrates Oxygen Availability to Redox Regulate NADPH Production and the Thiol Redoxome” is published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The NADPH/GAPDH connection

NADPH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate) is an important metabolite that is produced in cells. It provides a source of electrons that can act as an antioxidant and for the biosynthesis of numerous biomolecules, including fatty acids, amino acids, nucleotides, and cholesterol. 

“NADPH is not only used as an antioxidant, but also to build new biomolecules to sustain cell proliferation,” Reddi says. “How do cells know to make enough NADPH to support aerobic life?  We discovered that SOD1 senses oxygen availability via superoxide, and then converts this to hydrogen peroxide, which in turn inactivates an enzyme responsible for the breakdown of glucose, glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH).” That inactivation causes the build-up of metabolites that are re-routed to a pathway that synthesizes NADPH.

The story behind the SOD1 revelation

The PNAS research study began with a casual conversation in 2014 between Reddi and Torres at the former café in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB). 

“Given the very collaborative and collegial nature of faculty across the College of Sciences, and the Institute as a whole, it was easy to grab a coffee and discuss these ideas,” Reddi says. Work in the Reddi lab includes potential signaling roles for SOD1 and the hydrogen peroxide it produces; but understanding the extent to which these factors regulate signaling required a systems-level understanding of how widespread targets of SOD1 are in a cell. 

Torres focuses on mass spectrometry-based proteomics (the study of all proteins produced and modified by an organism or system) to probe cell-wide signaling networks, so it seemed to Reddi like a perfect fit.

Then, Reddi says, Montllor-Albalate made the discovery that SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide can regulate NADPH production and adaptation to aerobic life.  Meanwhile, Kim, a joint student of the Reddi and Torres labs, drove the work to identify proteome-wide targets of SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide. 

The conversation in IBB led to a 2016 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the topic further. The resulting paper “we feel will make a strong impact in the field of redox biology and signaling,” Reddi adds. 

SOD1’s potential in future cancer therapy

SOD1 is often thought of as an appealing anti-cancer therapeutic because of its ability to scavenge superoxides. The theory is that if SOD1 is inactivated, cancer cells will be at a disadvantage. 

Reddi says his team’s results “suggest this very simple approach may need to be reconsidered, because the hydrogen peroxide that is produced by SOD1 plays broader roles in metabolism — and regulates many other enzymes and pathways. For instance, many cancer cells are addicted to glucose (sugars) and have an increased reliance on it for energy and metabolism, with GAPDH being a key enzyme in the process. Our findings that SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide inactivates GAPDH would suggest that inhibiting SOD1 in certain cancers could actually result in elevated GAPDH activity, and increased metabolism of glucose, which may be detrimental in fighting cancer.”

Torres and Reddi are continuing their collaboration to investigate other aspects of SOD1 and hydrogen peroxide signaling in cancer metabolism and its implications for disease progression.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023328119

This work was supported by GM118744 to Reddi and Torres, and Blanchard Fellowship to Reddi. 

James Stringfellow, an employment specialist with a history of helping Atlanta-based veterans and entertainment industry staff in the workforce, has been named the first career educator for the College of Sciences.

“I am thrilled to have James join the Georgia Tech Career Center,” says Laura Garcia, director of Career Education Programs. “I hope everyone gives him a warm welcome to the Georgia Tech community.” 

Stringfellow, who began his duties on January 4, leads the following initiatives:

  • Assisting students with career mapping, co-op and internships, and workforce preparedness.
  • Supporting College of Sciences programs by facilitating career education events.
  • Supporting College instructors with employer updates and industry trends.
  • Developing employer partnerships to cultivate employment opportunities. 
  • Assisting the Career Center team in meeting its community goals.

Stringfellow will be available for remote meetings from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays. He will work out of Room 2-90 in the Boggs Building from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, and at the Georgia Tech Career Center (located on the first floor of the Bill Moore Student Success Center) from 8 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays.

Stringfellow previously worked for the Veterans Empowerment Organization (VEO) as their employment specialist responsible for assisting veterans with re-entry into the civilian workforce. Prior to the VEO, he served as an award-winning career services manager at SAE Institute where he oversaw employer outreach and graduate employment for audio, film, and entertainment business programs. Stringfellow also worked for DeVry University in both career services and admissions in support of its College of Health Sciences.  

Stringfellow earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Tuskegee University, and received his MBA in International Business from Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry. A member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Stringfellow shares that he stays connected to the entertainment industry by coaching creatives on how to protect their musical brand, speaking at related conferences, and serving as a disc jockey at various events throughout Atlanta.

“I am thrilled to have James join the College of Sciences,” shares Cameron Tyson, assistant dean for Academic Programs in the College of Sciences. 

Tyson and Garcia also extend a special thanks to the new role’s search committee for their “hard work and finding a great addition to our team.” Committee members included:

  • Alonzo Whyte (search chair), academic professional, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program
  • Andrew Newman, professor and undergraduate coordinator, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
  • Enid Steinbart, principal academic professional and director of Undergraduate Advising and Assessment, School of Mathematics
  • Mariah Liggins, advisor for Pre-Health, Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising
  • Mackenzie Pierce, undergraduate student, School of Psychology

The Georgia Tech College of Computing has received an $11 million grant from Schmidt Futures to create one of the four software engineering centers within the newly launched Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS). The new center will hire half-a-dozen software engineers to write scalable, reliable, and portable open-source software for scientific research.

“Scientific research involves increasingly complex software, technologies, and platforms,” said Alessandro Orso, the software engineer and professor of computer science who is heading up the project. “Also, platforms constantly evolve, and the complexity and amount of data involved is ever-growing.”

The result is that these software systems are often developed as prototypes that are difficult to understand, maintain, and use, which limits their efficacy and ultimately hinders scientific progress.

Software engineers are trained to address these kinds of issues and know how to build high-quality software, but their time is too expensive for a typical research project’s budget. In typical grants, software is often treated as a byproduct of research, meaning that limited funding is allocated for it.

That’s where Schmidt Futures comes in. Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. They are investing $40 million in VISS over five years at four universities: Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Cambridge.

“Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Institute for Scientific Software is a core part of our efforts to mobilize exceptional talent to solve specific hard problems in science and society,” said Executive Vice President Elizabeth Young-McNally.

At Georgia Tech, the funds will hire a software engineering lead, as well as three senior and two junior software engineers. A faculty director and an advisory board will help guide the group’s work, which will include collaborations with Georgia Tech scientists.

"We are very proud to host one of the four inaugural Schmidt Futures Virtual Institute of Scientific Software centers,” said Charles Isbell, Dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of Computing.

“Georgia Tech’s center will advance and support scientific research by applying modern software engineering practices, cutting-edge technologies, and modern tools to the development of scientific software. The center will also engage with students and researchers to train the next generation of software engineering leaders.”

The cycle of rising temperatures leads to increases in precipitation as well as droughts.  But what impact will these weather extremes, especially heavier precipitation, have on the earth’s most effective water cleansers – wetland sediments?  

That question is driving a new $1 million, three-year grant awarded to a Georgia Institute of Technology interdisciplinary research team of geochemistry, biology and applied mechanics experts.

The award is part of the Department of Energy’s $7.7 million funding of 11 studies to improve the understanding of Earth system predictability and the Department’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, a state-of the-science climate model. The researchers intend to develop a new scalable model that can analyze and ultimately predict where and when sediment disruptions are most likely to occur. 

Wetlands – Where Water and Land Meet

Found at the boundary between land and water, wetlands function as natural sponges that trap, cleanse, and slowly release surface water – they also serve as a natural climate change buffer, since they act as carbon “sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon and methane in the ground. Swamps, marshes, and bogs are all examples of wetlands. What isn’t known is if wetlands that become damaged or degraded from excess water will still absorb carbon at the same level.  

By better understanding how wetlands work, Georgia Tech hopes to shed light on how wetlands will function with more frequent and more intense rainstorms.   

“A lot of work has been done in polar regions where there has been melting because of global warming, which has been shown to release a lot of methane. That’s the main motivation behind the work we’re going to do,” said the project’s principal investigator, Martial Taillefert, a geochemist and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

As water levels rise, below ground oxygen is consumed very quickly, he explained. Then microbial processes take over, leading to methane forming as well as carbon dioxide, that can escape to the atmosphere.

In this project Taillefert will characterize the physical and chemical processes taking place in a wetland, mainly using electrochemical sensors deployed at different locations in the wetland. Taillefert will be able to follow the chemical response to microbial processes and study how perturbations of the water cycle affect the release of greenhouse gases. This data will then be used to fine tune the models that will predict greenhouse gas emissions.

Micro to Macro Scale
Initial studies will involve samples on the scale of a few grains of soil, but the researchers hope to eventually run simulations on the scale of a riverbed or watershed (where surface water drains into a common stream channel or other body of water).

“The goal is twofold – first, to satisfy our scientific curiosity and understand how those microbial processes can actually change the level of oxygen and trigger greenhouse gas emissions, and second, to develop a model that can predict what processes will be in the next cycle to better prepare and perhaps reduce carbon emissions in some cases,” said project collaborator Chloé Arson, associate professor of Geosystems Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

While Taillefert focuses on the chemistry component and Arson on the mathematical modeling, collaborator Thomas DiChristina serves as the microbe expert.

“My lab looks at what kind of hidden microbial processes are going on that we can't detect with the sensors because the methane is getting recycled so fast in the ground,” said DiChristina, professor in the School of Biological Sciences

DiChristina will be looking at multiple gene expressions without having to grow the bacteria in a laboratory. 

“Genomics allows you to deduce expression of metabolic potential. For example, which gene is producing methane, and which gene is inhibiting methane production,” he said.

Since methane won’t release into the atmosphere unless a certain condition occurs, the model will enable researchers to predict under what conditions methane would pour out of the sediments versus being retained and recycled, DiChristina explained.

The calculations that predict how much methane and carbon dioxide go into the atmosphere depend on an accurate description of what's happening in the subsurface -- in the sediment and in groundwater, Taillefert added. 

“We cannot yet quantify that really well. We think using our approach will enable us to get more data and a better understanding of how the process works and translate that knowledge into the models,” he said.

Taillefert and DiChristina have been working on improving Georgia Tech’s models for predicting these processes for over three decades.  With this latest award, they hope to better understand and model the processes of oxidation and reduction that change the microstructure of sediments during cycles of flood.

New Research Thrust – AI and Machine Learning  

Arson is most interested in predicting the changes in the size, shape, and arrangement of the grains of soil to understand how the porous space between the grains is affected by bio-chemical reactions. 

“Understanding the evolution of the porous space will help predict transport properties within the sediments, and the expected emissions of greenhouse gases,” said Arson. 

An expert in applied mechanics, she will use AI to build a model that can single out dominant reactions within the soil microstructure and disregard those that have minimal impact. Such insight will help simplify the model and allow it to more quickly correlate certain criteria that leads to spikes in greenhouse gases. 

“If you have a predictive model that actually attempts to explain the processes, as well as predicting them, then you have a more versatile approach that can be transferred to many other sites or environments,” she said. “I also could envision using this model and the machine learning algorithm to map locations where you expect higher emissions, and identify sites as risky, moderately risky or safe.”

Georgia Tech is partnering with two Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories: Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) in Aiken, SC, and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, IL.

“Georgia Tech has a unique capability here that we don't have, and that capability is this combination of using state-of-the-art genomics capabilities, along with state-of-the-art electrochemistry, two attributes that Georgia Tech is internationally known for,” said Daniel Kaplan, senior research fellow with SRNL, which will serve as the study site.

Kaplan noted that Georgia Tech’s research fits perfectly with the DOE’s goal to better understand how wetlands function, enabling scientists to better understand their role in controlling water quality.

“Wetlands do a great job of cleaning out all the impurities and getting rid of a lot of the contaminants to clean the water up as it moves through a watershed,” said Kaplan. 

Atomic-scale Analysis  

Argonne National Laboratory plans to take Georgia Tech’s sediment samples and examine them at the atomic scale of individual atoms and electrons using the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a football-field-sized synchrotron that produces x-rays 10 billion times clearer than what is produced at a doctor’s office.

“The fundamental reactions that are controlling the quality of the water happen at the microorganism or nano scale,” said Kenneth Kemner, senior physicist and group leader of the Molecular Environmental Science Group at the Argonne National Lab. “By bringing all the different ways of looking at wetlands together, we'll actually have a much deeper understanding of how they function.”

From one of several x-ray ports operated 24x7, the APS can capture images of single microorganisms about 100 times smaller than the diameter of the human hair. In fact, when the APS first came online, it successfully analyzed hair strands of Ludwig van Beethoven, with the analysis deducing that the great German composer suffered from lead poisoning.

Kemner acknowledged that Georgia Tech brings unique capabilities to the wetlands research effort. He explained that answering the hard questions such as those posed by climate change will require this transdisciplinary and integrated problem-solving approach. 

Additional unfunded collaborators for this study include Christa Pennacchio, PMO Lead with the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (JGI), and Stephen Callister, scientist with the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a U.S. DOE national scientific user facility managed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.   

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) has announced that a 2022 Molecular Pharmacology Early Career Award will be presented to Dr. Matthew Torres, faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences, in recognition of his scholarly achievements as a junior investigator in the field of molecular pharmacology.

Dr. Torres is receiving this award in recognition of his innovative research that combines genetics, mass spectrometry, and cutting-edge bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications impact protein function and cell physiology, and also in recognition of his strong commitment to teaching, mentoring and service. Dr. Torres is currently an Associate Professor in the School. He received his PhD in biochemistry and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The primary focus of Dr. Torres’s lab is to combine yeast genetics, mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications (PTMs) impact protein structure, function and cell behavior. His group studies how PTMs regulate G protein signaling pathways, with a current emphasis on the G protein gamma subunit. His lab also developed SAPH-ire (“Systematic Analysis of PTM Hotspots”), a bioinformatics tool that employs machine learning to prioritize PTMs important for protein function and provide recommendations for experimental analysis. Dr. Torres has been a member of ASPET since 2017.

The award will be presented by the Division for Molecular Pharmacology at the ASPET Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, April 4, 2022 where Dr. Torres will deliver a lecture on his research titled "From m/z to Gαβγ: Accessing the Collective Wisdom in Proteomics to Reveal Posttranslational Governors of G protein Signaling".

The talk will focus on the development of protein bioinformatic and computational tools that revealed how Gγ subunits - through phosphorylation of their intrinsically disordered N-termini - can serve as governors of Gβγ signaling.

Story adapted from:

2022 ASPET Award Winners

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