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Abstracts
When Odd is sexy
To a peahen, not much is sexier than the striking splendor of a peacock’s tail. In fact, one theory suggests the peahen’s preference for elaborate plumage drove the development of the cumbersome appendage.
But what of the relatively drab, androgynous oyster? Clam? Sea urchin? How do they “choose” mates when the sexes look the same? When their gametes meet at the mercy of capricious waves and currents of the sea? At first glance, it might appear there’s just no reason to be discriminating in mollusk dating.
But a close study of the sex lives of sea urchins by Don Levitan, professor of biological science, has found otherwise. The key, he revealed, is partially in the genes, as we’ve come to expect. But he also showed an unexpected factor that might help determine the rate of evolution: crowding.
Levitan and graduate student David Ferrell uncovered this by examining the genetic code for a sperm protein, the one that attaches to an egg for fertilization. It came as no surprise to discover that when male sea urchins have the common form of that protein’s gene, the urchins did well for themselves. That is, they fathered lots of baby urchins. If a protein works, why take a chance and change it?
But a look at the females showed a surprising pattern. The same gene—though probably dormant in females because it codes for a male protein—was related to how many offspring the females had.
The reason for this is still murky territory that Levitan’s lab is working to clear up. But already this study, published in Science in April, presents a brand new twist to the evolutionary story.
Scientists have looked at sexual selection mostly from a “males compete; females choose” perspective as in the archetypal peacock example. But the urchin research adds the dimension of crowding. When urchins are sparse, females with the common form of the sperm protein have more babies. When crowded, females with the rare form thrive. And, at least in theory, in an isolated urchin community where a rare gene can flourish, the possibility it will lead to a new species gets much better. Levitan’s work is also the first demonstration of the functional significance of reproductive proteins in nature.
More details are left to flesh out, but the implications might go well beyond sea life. Levitan’s research lends added credence to recent—within the past decade or so—attention to sexual conflict, a new field of evolutionary biology that truly studies the battle of the sexes and how it can help drive evolution.
Ancient Ants
Best known for its legendary plant-munching dinosaurs, the Jurassic Period witnessed the emergence of another mighty animal, new research suggests. This one at the other end of the size spectrum but far luckier than the long-extinct reptilian giants.
Biologists reported in Science magazine in April that ants, one of the most successful—not to mention still breathing—animals on the planet appeared 140 to 168 million years ago, at least 15 million years earlier than previously thought.
The insect’s considerable fossil record had suggested ants arose in the middle of the Cretaceous Period, along with Tyrannosaurus rex. But new molecular data collected and analyzed by scientists from Harvard, along with Charles Bell, a visiting biology researcher at the FSU School of Computational Science, showed ant ancestry reaches much further back. So instead of ferocious T. rex, it was with herb-eating Stegosaurus that ants made their debut.
Bell and the Harvard team reached this conclusion after comparing stretches of DNA from 139 species of ants and, with the help of fossil data, fleshing out for the first time a detailed ant family tree.
For the project’s success, Bell largely credited a program developed by David Swofford, Francis Eppes professor of biological science who is heavily involved in a multi-institutional effort to create a resource for systematic biologists all over the world.
Swofford’s software—the most popular of its kind, by one study’s count—determines the most likely relationships among species and recreates their family tree, a formidable task without the aid of computers.
With samples from more than 100 species, the number of possible trees exceeds the number of measurable particles in the universe, Bell said.
But PAUP (for Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony), as Swofford’s software is called, along with another program called MrBayes (co-developed by FSU associate professor of biological science Fredrik Ronquist) and a cluster of computers at the FSU School of Computational Science finally figured out the prolific ant family tree that had gone unmapped for years.
Reading Center Targets Dyslexia with NIH Grant
Snagging a $6 million federal grant this summer, FSU became one of four institutions in the country to be part of the National Institutes of Health flagship program targeting learning disabilities.
The other recipients include the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the University of Houston and the University of Colorado at Boulder, the only one of four previous grantees that secured the five-year award again.
The funding will create a new FSU center that will focus on a deeper understanding of dyslexia, a learning disorder that impairs reading ability, and on its early diagnosis and prevention.
Dyslexia, the most common learning disability known, isn’t normally detected until the second or third grade, said Richard Wagner, professor of psychology and principal investigator for the center.
Taking a comprehensive approach, the center will tap into FSU expertise in psychology, education and communication disorders. In addition to Wagner, the diverse team will include Chris Lonigan, Chris Schatschneider, Jeanette Taylor, Brad Schmidt, Thomas Joiner and Joe Torgesen from psychology; Stephanie Al Otaiba, Carol Connor, Beth Phillips and Alysia Roehrig-Bice from education; and Howard Goldstein from communication disorders. Collaboration with geneticists from the Yale University School of Medicine will round out the group.
A handful of large-scale studies on dyslexia are on the center’s five-year agenda and will involve thousands of families in Florida. Two are already underway, Wagner said.
The center will operate under the umbrella of FSU’s Florida Center for Reading Research.
Nobel Laureate Kroto Tapped For National Honor
In April, chemistry professor and Nobel laureate Harold Kroto received one of the country’s highest distinctions that can be accorded a scientist or engineer. Kroto, a British native, became one of 18 foreign associates elected this year to the National Academy of Sciences, an organization of more than 2,000 members that works to further science.
Raised and educated in England, Kroto is best known for his co-discovery in 1985 of a form of carbon—only the third form known aside from graphite and diamond. The spherical form, called buckminsterfullerene and nicknamed buckyball, spurred a new branch of chemistry and a race in engineering to put the molecule’s extraordinary strength and light weight to practical use.
For the surprise discovery, Kroto along with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl Jr. shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996.
Kroto calls the buckyball finding a diversion. In fact, what his team was trying to do when they stumbled upon the molecule was recreate gaseous conditions inside a simulated red giant, an expanded star whose core has heated up in its old age. And this is the experiment Kroto is getting back to at FSU nearly 20 years later.
Always one to plunge into multiple pursuits (in addition to studying chemistry at the University of Sheffield, Kroto played on the tennis team and was the art editor of a student magazine), while continuing to do research, he has been a passionate champion of science education for more than a decade. He has campaigned globally to expand the reach of the Internet and to provide reliable online science content.
Toward this goal, he launched the Vega Science Trust, an organization that produces science, engineering and technology programs for broadcast on television and free through the Web site www.vega.org.uk. The dream: to inject enough excitement and curiosity into the world’s youth to grow the next generation of scientists.
“[Young people] are into rock and roll. I’m a big Rolling Stones guy, but I don’t think it’s going to save the world.”
Religion vs. Science
FSU Hosts National Forum On Impact of Dover Decision
It was the nation’s first critical, public examination of a federal court ruling that may have far-reaching implications for the way science will be taught in public K-12 classrooms for many years to come.
Well before the two-hour public affairs forum ended on the evening of May 17 on FSU’s campus, it was clear to an SRO crowd of 400—along with a nationwide audience tuned in via the Web—that the impact of Kitzmiller v. The Dover (Pennsylvania) School District, decided Dec. 20, 2005 by Judge John E. Jones III, is one court case that won’t soon be forgotten in the long, often loony American saga of public education.
Jones’s ruling, hailed as a victory for science education by national leaders in science and public policy, capped the country’s first court battle pitting advocates of “intelligent design”—an anti-evolution philosophy—against proponents of the theory of natural selection in explaining human origins. In a strongly worded, 139-page decision, Jones denounced ID as “a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory.” Jones ruled that ID is a religion-based idea that, if taught in public schools, would violate a constitutional mandate for keeping matters of faith and government separate—precisely the same objection raised by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1987 ruling that banned the teaching of creationism as science in public schools.
Although the ruling applies only to a single district of a single state, it immediately sent shockwaves throughout the country where last January there were pro-ID initiatives under way in at least two dozen states. Not surprisingly, the furor touched off a well-coordinated blog-storm among creationist and pro-ID groups around the country.
In contrast, from the winning side in the case—which included evolutionists, the vast majority of scientists and many religious leaders—no cohesive response was heard until May 17, when Florida State held “Keeping Science and Religion Separate in Schools: The Vigil After Dover.”
Six panelists extremely well versed in the ID/creationism vs. evolution debate—including two who testified for the plaintiffs in the Dover case and one whose non-profit group served as chief consultant for the plaintiff’s attorneys—were invited to campus for the special event. Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (and FSU alum) and professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s journalism school, moderated the panel discussion.
Co-sponsoring the program were The University Research Magazine Association and FSU’s Office of Research. The event highlighted the 25th anniversary conference of URMA, held the week of May 16 on campus and hosted by the Office of Research.
Copies of a DVD of the entire forum, along with a downloadable transcript, are available from www.research.fsu.edu/Dover.
Cellular “Scissors”
To survive, we need all kinds of proteins. To exist at all, there’s at least one we absolutely cannot do without.
Scientists have long known that a family of proteins called endonucleases is critical to our existence. They know these special proteins are enzymes that snip out specific bits of DNA and RNA molecules. The trimming results in the streamlined pieces a cell needs to build other essential proteins. 
A cell without endonuclease is like a carpenter without a saw. No saw, no house. Likewise: no endonuclease, no protein, no life as we know it. This much, scientists have known for years.
But no one could figure out how these “scissors of the cell” worked. Until now.
After a seven-year quest, Hong Li, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has answered at least part of this fundamental question of molecular biology.
Li’s team used Argonne National Lab outside Chicago to capture images of the molecule in action using X-ray crystallography. What they found was a stunningly simple, cooperative effort: One copy of the endonuclease acts like a vise, holding the RNA steady as another copy of the protein joins the first. Both then do the clipping.
“If you don’t have the two partners together and the right RNA in place, this cutting activity won’t take place,” Li said.
Li describes her work with the endonuclease from a single-cell organism in a paper published in May in the journal Science, and she teamed up with New Jersey-based drug company PTC Therapeutics to extend the research to humans and found another astonishing result.
They explained in an article in Nature that the “blade” part of the endonuclease is exactly the same in the single-cell organism as it is in more complicated organisms, including humans. There is variation across organisms in the “scissor handles” or in the number of parts involved, but the section that does the cutting is so fundamental to life, it has remained the same over billions of years.
Li’s insight into the mechanics of endonuclease could have a wide-ranging impact in fields from evolutionary biology to medicine.
“Nazi Voices” Wins Gold
Last fall, Research in Review’s cover story featured a book by historian Robert Gellately that revealed long-lost interviews with most of the key Nazi defendants in the first Nuremberg trial. In May, the article—entitled “The Nazi Voices of Nuremberg”—was selected for one of five gold medals awarded for excellence in feature writing by the Washington, D.C.-based Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), an international professional development organization for higher education professionals. The article competed against 265 entries for the honor.
Meanwhile, Gellately reports that his book, The Nuremberg Interviews (Knopf, 2004), has been translated into a 15th language, this time Hebrew. A BBC film crew visited Gellately’s office this spring and is producing a docudrama, “The Secret Road to Nuremberg,” which is scheduled to air on the Discovery Channel in October, 60 years after the trial culminated in the execution of 10 of 21 convicted Nazi war criminals.
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