Fish-Eye Science
How human beings start out as a single cell typically nine months before they're born with a bewildering variety of fully developed organs and tissues is a biological feat of enormous—and not well-understood—proportions.

How do these extraordinarily powerful first cells—called embryonic stem cells —go about the extremely complicated task of deciding what organs to start building first, and where?

It's the central question that drives the field of developmental biology, where scientists must pay close attention to an animal's genetic make-up for clues.

Recently, FSU developmental biologist James Fadool, together with biologists from Harvard University, the University of Louisville and the Medical College of Wisconsin, uncovered a genetic “switch” that gives a small fish the ability to see. The discovery clearly outlines how a group of stem cells get directed toward one central task—the formation of the fish's retina, the layer of light-sensitive cells that line the inside back wall of our eyeballs.

Fadool and his colleagues made their discovery in zebrafish, a small, freshwater fish that is gaining popularity among biologists as a model for studying the development of vertebrates (animals with backbones). Fadool's team has found that this tiny fish can't develop a retina--and thus eyesight—unless a specific gene gets “switched on” during development.

But the stem cells don't stop there, Fadool said. They subsequently branch off into one of at least six different types of specialized retinal cells, which communicate with each other to send visual signals down the optic nerve to the brain. These specialized cells include the commonly known rods and cones, the main cells responsible for collecting and processing light that strikes the retina.

To study how rods in the fish's retina get organized during development, Fadool genetically manipulated a strain of zebrafish so that its rod cells would express a green fluorescent protein. These “green-eyed fish” allowed Fadool to analyze the appearance and distribution of the rods as the zebrafish developed from an embryo to adulthood.

Fadool found that during development the rods organize themselves into a highly ordered pattern, or mosaic, in which rows of rods are evenly distributed among rows of cones. This mosaic of light-sensitive cells appears to be a way to insure that the retina is able to gather light uniformly, no matter where it strikes the eye, Fadool believes.

“These findings provide us with important inroads into several fundamental principles of developmental biology, and cancer biology too: namely, which cells are made, where they form and at what time.”
—Ann Morris

A DNA-Free Life Form?
They rank as one of nature's most bizarre life-forms.

Since their discovery in the early 1980s, prions (“PREE-ons”) have defied attempts by biologists to fully explain how these mysterious bits of protein work. The tiny particles are thought to be the cause of mad cow disease and similar brain disorders.

A discovery by FSU scientists—detailed last March 18 in the journal Nature—is hailed as an unqualified breakthrough in the quest to understand the role prions play in neurological diseases.

Two post-doctoral researchers working in the Institute for Molecular Biophysics delivered the “first definitive proof” that prions can transfer heritable traits from one living system to another without the help of gene-carrying DNA or its cousin RNA, compounds called nucleic acids.

The finding—by Chih-Yen King and Ruben Diaz-Avalos—means that what school kids have been taught for decades—that DNA is the basis of all heredity, including the transmission of deadly diseases—isn't true. Prions can do their often deadly work without any help from genetic material, the work showed.

Working with yeast cultures, King and Diaz-Avalos isolated and identified three different strains of yeast prions, each of which were found to originate from the same protein molecule that, for reasons yet unknown, turned into infectious prions.

The team found that these all-protein particles act just like genes in transferring life-changing information in yeast cells without relying on DNA or RNA as the information carriers.

The research helps resolve the most puzzling question in prion research, King said. Since prions were first hypothesized in 1982 by Stanley Prusiner, a professor at the University of San Franciso, the curious particles have been implicated in a variety of degenerative neurological diseases, ranging from scrapie in sheep to the now well known bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, that can be passed on to humans with lethal consequences.

Scientists thus reasoned that prions came in multiple strains, just like viruses, capable of producing different symptoms in host animals. But unlike viruses, which essentially are tightly coiled packages of DNA or RNA, exhaustive analysis never found even the slightest trace of nucleic acids in prions. Many scientists could not imagine any way for an infectious agent to affect host animals in different ways without using DNA to pass along different sets of instructions to living cells.

Even after Prusiner won a Nobel Prize for Medicine for his ground-breaking prion work in 1997, many scientists were still skeptical that his “protein-only” theory—that prions could act as agents of heredity all on their own without the benefit of DNA —would hold up.

Using yeast as a model because of its reproductive speed and its safety (yeast prions are harmless), King and Diaz-Avalos demonstrated that prions act much the same way in yeast as they apparently do in mammals.

When introduced into healthy cells, so-called “misfolded proteins” (or prions) seek out and find certain proteins that are identical to the proteins from which they were originally made. Contact with the invading prions causes healthy protein molecules to warp into the same “misfolded” pattern as their attackers, thereby becoming prions themselves. Invariably, this leads to the disruption or alteration of normal cell function, King said.

Another key find in the FSU study is that prions formed in host cells are amyloids, a family of fiber-forming proteins that often are associated with neurological disorders in humans. Amyloid plaques in human brain tissue, for example, are a well-known component of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Scientists have long debated whether such plaques are merely a symptom of such diseases or a cause.

King says his work proves that, at least in yeast cultures, amyloid fibers are the primary causes of infections, not the result of them.

“Amyloids (in yeast) we now know are not the end-product of the infection—they're the cause,” he said.

Sir Harold Kroto, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, spent the spring semester as a visiting professor at FSU. President of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Kroto has a missionary zeal in promoting science education to all age groups. During his Tallahassee sojourn, Kroto delivered public lectures on science and society, taught a graduate class on interstellar chemistry and led a workshop for elementary school students.

Internet Express
At times, the information superhighway gets as clogged up as U.S. A1A when a Florida fraternity hosts a spring break bikini contest.

Congested traffic created by the Internet's popularity frustrates scientists doing research. Get too many students eating up bandwidth by downloading music and a university server will move like a jalopy with blown tires-far too slow for academics.

So, nine universities in Florida are building a new superhighway just for themselves-dedicated solely to research. The Florida LambdaRail, as the system is called, is a 40-lane, fiber-optic high-bandwidth network set to roll out early next year.

The project is a branch of the National LambdaRail, an $80 million federal initiative. Boosters say this system will revolutionize the sharing of information among scientists and researchers around the nation.

The Florida network will connect to the national one at Jacksonville. Supporters of the public-private partnership which is creating the Florida LambdaRail say each strand of the glass fiber in the network will be capable of transmitting 400 billion bits of data a second, the equivalent of 5 million simultaneous phone conversations or 250 high-definition television images or the contents of a library floor of books.

For research, such huge computing power could handle projects that demand trillions or even quadrillions of computations a second, such as genome research, earthquake simulation and climate modeling.

“The LambdaRail conquers space. Collaboration between people widely separated by distance becomes as easy as working with someone just down the hall,” says Kirby Kemper, FSU's vice president for research. “Data sets previously too huge to send across the Internet will flow as easily as e-mail from one desktop to another.”

When completed, the National LambdaRail could propel the U.S. research community back into the lead on Internet development, proponents say. Europe and Asia already have surpassed the U.S. in high-end applications and LambdaRail enthusiasts say that's not good for America's research community.

Half of the new network's bandwidth will be reserved for network-oriented research and the other half for scientific applications. It will provide faculty access to supercomputing centers and other academic institutions across the nation.

“We couldn't afford to buy this kind of conductivity so we're building it,” says Larry Conrad, FSU's associate vice president for Technology Integration. “It opens up possibilities that have not been there before and that we haven't even envisioned yet.”

The nine universities in Florida that are participating in the project are: FSU; Florida Atlantic University; Florida Institute of Technology; Florida International University; Nova Southeastern University; University of Central Florida; University of Florida; University of Miami and the University of West Florida.

To support the project, participants have signed off on a five-year, $19 million budget. Conrad says FSU's share amounts to $500,000 a year. He says researchers are capitalizing on an overbuilt fiber-optic network, a slump in the telecommunications industry and recognition among corporate supporters, like CISCO Systems, that university research is important to keeping the U.S. economy competitive.

Fish Havens Extended
The fish don't know how lucky they are.

Last spring, the federal government extended the protection of two small pieces of their spawning grounds from fishing.

In March , the small experimental marine reserves in the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico, begun in June 2000 to study their potential for protecting spawning populations of grouper and other bottom-dwelling fish, were given more time by federal fishery managers to prove their worth.

The reserves, originally scheduled to be sunsetted this June, will continue through June 2010.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) approved the six-year extension after reviewing testimony from fishermen and scientists who argued in favor of the extensions last year.

The move was welcome news to FSU marine biologists Felicia Coleman and her colleague and husband Chris Koenig. Throughout the 1990s, the two scientists led research into grouper biology that led to the creation of the two marine reserves in 2000.

The FSU researchers documented the existence of a deepwater (180- to 300-feet) area in the Northeastern Gulf that is used each winter and early spring by gag grouper for spawning. For recreational anglers throughout the Gulf, the gag grouper is the most important grouper species.

The two reserves, named the Madison/Swanson and Steamboat Lumps, lie roughly 55 to 75 miles south-southeast of Apalachicola in the Florida Panhandle, or roughly 95 miles west of Tarpon Springs. Madison/Swanson covers about 115 square nautical miles while Steamboat Lumps is somewhat smaller at 104 square nautical miles.

Last year, members of The Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council--the federal ruling authority in the Gulf charged with recommending policy to NMFS-analyzed findings produced by Coleman, Koenig and other marine scientists that showed the reserves were working as designed. Larger fish with greater egg-producing potential were found within the protected sites than outside them, and an increase in the number of male groupers was noted, Coleman said. The Council also heard from a number of commercial anglers who voiced their support of continuing the reserves.

“We're on the cusp of determining whether the obvious protection afforded by the reserves spills over into fisheries production outside of the reserve boundaries. The extra time provided through the extension in making that determination is critical,”Koenig said.

All bottom-fishing is ban-ned in the reserves. The U.S. Coast Guard, the authority chiefly responsible for enforcement. has made a number of arrests of poachers within the sites since their creation.

Growing Pains
Is the phrase “growth management in Florida” an oxymoron?

For anyone who has lived in the state during the past two decades, that could be a reasonable assumption. What growth management?

Exactly, says an FSU economist. Florida's much ballyhooed Growth Management Act-created in 1985 to try to curb urban sprawl and other environmental maladies brought on by a spiraling population-is a dismal failure, says Randall Holcombe.

Trumpeted by environmentalists, the act has done little if anything to ease traffic congestion or air and water pollution as it was originally intended. Holcombe reached his conclusions earlier this year after analyzing the act's impact on the eve of its 20th anniversary as Florida law.

Frustrated by an inability to meet the demands of a mushrooming population, growth management advocates in Florida began petitioning the Legislature in the early 1980s to give citizens a say in deciding how a community grows.

The law's passage in 1985 was hailed as finally giving city and county planners the power they needed to deny building permits when proposed projects didn't fit a community's vision and infrastructure.

Backers have always claimed that this authority would encourage urban infill (building up urban areas to capacity); help curb road congestion and stop construction in places where urban services weren't readily available.

Holcombe says that this laudable goal has rarely been achieved, mainly because he thinks most politically mandated growth management measures-for all their good intentions-simply don't make good environmental sense in the first place.

Holcombe cites federal data on air quality collected over a 10-year period in rural, suburban and urban areas that show substantially worse air pollution occurring over areas with high population density. The law actually aggravates one of the main problems-urban sprawl-it was written to address, he said.

Holcombe found that while Florida's growth management law may promote renovation and new construction within city limits, it drives up the price of urban real estate and development. Consequently, developers seeking more affordable properties for there customers have little alternative but to move into outlying areas.

“Growth management ignores market forces but people can't afford to do that,” Holcombe said. “The market offers an incentive for people to exploit a weakness in the law wherever they can.”

After nearly two decades, Florida's growth management law has become little more than a regulatory speed bump rather than a stop sign, he said. Developers almost always find ways to get around growth restrictions and pass the cost along to customers.

For example, Holcombe said that if a particular project doesn't meet a community's vision, then the builder lobbies to change the local comprehensive plan. If cities say they can't afford to pay for infrastructure improvements, as is often the case, developers typically offer to pay for these-and then add their cost to the buyer's final bill.

“Urban sprawl may sound bad but frankly, it's a relief valve for areas where there are too many people,” Holcombe said. “You can't stop people from moving to Florida, but you may price some people out of a market.”

New Lab Leader
As its 10th year began, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory-headquartered at Tallahassee's Innovation Park-wrapped up a national search for a new director. In February, Greg Boebinger, 44, was named to replace Jack Crow, the lab's founding director, who announced he was stepping down last year.

Boebinger (pronounced BOH-bin-jer) comes to Tallahassee from Los Alamos National Laboratory in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A physicist, Boebinger served as Los Alamos' deputy leader for science programs within the lab's Division of Materials Science and Technology. He joined Los Alamos in 1998 as director of the lab's Pulsed Magnetic Field Laboratory. Before that he worked as a staff physicist, specializing in high field pulsed magnets, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

In a farewell ceremony held at the lab March 26, Crow was honored for his 15-year service at the lab's helm. A commemorative bust of Crow was unveiled before a standing-only crowd of well-wishers.

Coming to FSU in 1989 as head of the university's Center for Materials Research and Technology, Crow soon became instrumental in FSU's effort to re-establish the federal government's sole high-magnetic field laboratory-since 1960 previously based at MIT-in Tallahassee. In 1990, the National Science Foundation approved a plan that created a lab consortium, making FSU a partner with the University of Florida and Los Alamos, with central administrative and operational functions based at Innovation Park. The lab opened to scientists on Oct. 1, 1994.

Today, the NHMFL is considered the preeminent site in the world for pushing the limits of magnetic fields in science and technology.