BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT

The Biology Department continually seeks to upgrade its offerings. This past year saw the addition of Professor Lara Hutson, who came to us from the University of Utah Medical Center, and offered a new senior course, Cell Dynamics in Living Systems (BIOL 410). The department also welcomed Professor Claire Ting from MIT who also offered a new senior course, Life at Extremes: Molecular Mechanisms (BIOL 414). The Biology Department also recruited an additional faculty member, Jason Wilder – Williams ’97, who will begin his term in 2005. Jason comes to us from University of Arizona in Tucson. His expertise is in the area of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Each year at graduation, the Biology Department awards prizes to several outstanding majors. This year’s recipients were Shauna Dineen and Michelle Kron, who received the Benedict Prize in Biology; David Arnolds, the Conant-Harrington prize for exemplary performance in the biology major; Flynn Boonstra, the Dwight Prize for excellence in Botany; and Marina Vivero and Greg DelPrete, who shared the Grant Prize for the students demonstrating excellence in a broad range of areas in biology. Eight seniors were nominated for induction into Sigma Xi, the national scientific research society. Drees Griffin and Chris Richardson were selected to work at the Whitehead Institute this summer as Whitehead Scholars.

The Biology Department continued to participate in the Class of 1960 Scholars Program. Several distinguished scientists were invited to meet with students and faculty. Among those invited were Dr. Scott Hultgren, Washington University; Dr. Jerry Melillo, Marine Biological Laboratory; and Dr. John Thompson, UCSC. Fifteen students were selected to be Class of 1960 Scholars for the spring/fall 2004

Professor Marsha Altschuler taught Genetics (BIOL202) in the fall semester. During the spring semester, Professor Altschuler was on a mini-sabbatical and thus did no teaching (except for a guest lecture in ANTH102), but spent her time largely in her lab exploring the mysteries of the organization of the Tetrahymena thermophila genome. She attended the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology meeting on ciliate molecular biology in August 2003 at Saxtons River, VT; a Genbank workshop at Vassar College run by The National Center for Biotechnology Information in March 2004; and the Society of Protozoologists meeting in Smithfield, RI in June 2004. Mary Flynn ’04, Bryan Harmon ’04, and Michael Leparc ’05 participated in the design and construction of “fragmentation vectors” in Professor Altschuler’s research lab during summer of 2003. These vectors will aid in the structural mapping and functional analysis of individual Tetrahymena chromosomes. Mary Flynn continued her project in the fall semester and WSP ’04 to complete an honors research project. Mary’s efforts paid off in obtaining the first Tetrahymena transformants using our fragmentation vectors. Alissa Caron ’06 volunteered time to work on a plasmid construction project during the fall semester. During the summer of 2004, four area high school students joined the lab for a week under the auspices of the College’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grant. Thus, Professor Altschuler’s research was helped along during this year through the efforts of many students who were at different points in their educational experience.

Professor Henry Art, with Sarah Gardner, taught Environmental Planning and Design Workshop (ENVI 302) in the fall semester, and taught a lab section of Ecology (BIOL 203). Professor Art also taught a special course in Winter Study entitled Picturing our Past. In the spring, he taught a senior tutorial, The Ecology of Ecological Resources and team taught Introduction to Environmental Science (ENVI 102) with Heather Stoll of the Geoscience Department and Jay Thoman from Chemistry.

With the assistance of Jason Taylor from the Office of Information Technology, Professor Art developed an electronic database of historical quantitative data from the Hopkins Memorial Forest permanent plots served to students in BIOL 320 through the College intranet. The database was well received and used in the course and now is being expanded to an internet-served database with a more user friendly interface that has been designed by Geshri Gunasekera ’06 and is available through http://www.williams.edu/ces/hmf.

Over the summer of 2003, Professor Art supervised Flynn Boonstra ’04, who was working on her thesis research, Dan Bahls and Bethany Sayles, who were conducting deed research on the Hopkins memorial Forest, and Jen Lazar ’04, who was collaborating on a content.dm database to serve his January 2005 WSP course, Picturing our Past. In addition, Professor Art was involved in the summer Williams Instructional Technology (WIT) project of having a WIT team desig a webv interface to the content.dm database available through http://contentdm.williams.edu.

Professor Art continues as Director of CES and has served as a reviewer for the American Institute of Biological Sciences Sustainable Forestry Grant Program.

Visiting Associate Professor Lois Banta taught Microbiology: Diversity, Cellular Physiology, and Interactions (BIOL 315) in the fall and Metabolic Biochemistry (BIOL 322) in the spring. She also continued her research on the soil bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens, which is best known for its unique ability to deliver DNA to host plant cells, thus stably altering the genetic makeup of the plant and causing crown gall tumors to form at the infection site. The transport machinery, comprised of multiple VirB proteins and VirD4, is the prototype for several similar systems required for other clinically important bacteria to cause disease in their mammalian hosts. The goal of the research in the Banta lab is to probe the interactions between the VirB pore and the transported substrates, which include not only DNA, but also at least two proteins. One of the honors students this year, Jackie Hom ’04, continued the thesis work of Susan Levin ’02 and Ken-ichi Ueda ’03 by investigating a novel mechanism for regulation of transcription of a subset of the virB genes. Summer student Meghan Giuliano ’05 and independent study student Anne Newcomer ’04 also made significant contributions to this project, which Professor Banta presented at the 24th Annual Crown Gall meeting, and at an international meeting in France. A second honors student in the lab, Virginia Newman (Chemistry, ’04) worked on purifying the VirC1 protein, which the Banta lab has hypothesized plays a role in enhancing the specificity of the transport machinery for the DNA substrate. Kate Roberts (independent study student, ’04) obtained a critical piece of data confirming this model, and Alice Hensley ’05 spent the summer following up on the research on VirC1 performed last year by former honors student Emily Hatch ’03. Jessica Davis ’06 also initiated a new line of investigation over the summer into the mechanism by which the DNA and proteins enter the plant cell.

As an independent study student in the Banta lab, Jeff Dougherty ’05 devised a project to explore a sustainable alternative to conventional sewage treatment facilities. In an outgrowth of his work in Professor Banta’s Microbiology course, he used molecular techniques to identify the bacteria in the microbial communities that contribute to sewage purification in the “Living Machine” at the Darrow School in New Lebanon, NY. As another extension of independent projects performed in the microbiology course, four local high-school students spent a week in the Banta lab, studying the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes among soil bacteria. Because Agrobacterium tumefaciens can transfer a variety of DNA molecules to plants, it is possible that antibiotic resistance genes present in environmental samples (e.g. manure used as fertilizer) could find their way into crop plants. The high-school students used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to assess the distribution of mobilizable plasmids conferring antibiotic resistance in local agricultural samples, and standard microbial cultivation techniques to study the bacterial species present in the soil community. Finally, during Winter Study, Ashleigh Theberge ’06 continued an independent project on the effects of the herbicide Round-Up on Fischerella, a photosynthesizing bacterium that provides important nutrients in rice paddies.

During this academic year, Banta served as an external reviewer for the National Science Foundation and the Consortium for Plant Biotechnology. She gave a guest lecture in the physics course, Science and Religious Experience, and served on the Biochemistry/Molecular Biology advisory committee, the Bioinformatics, Genomics and Proteomics advisory committee, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Advisory Committee. She also participated in a conference on Science and Social Responsibility at the Hastings Center, and served as a judge at the first annual New England Ethics Bowl. Banta co-authored a successful grant proposal to the Sherman-Fairchild Foundation for $500,000 in equipment, which will be used to establish a capstone laboratory course for the new cross-disciplinary program in Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics at Williams; she presented the plans for that program at an NSF sponsored workshop at Wheaton College in June.

In this, her first year at Williams, Lara Hutson taught two new courses, Cell Dynamics (BIOL 410) in the fall and Mechanisms of Nervous System Development (BIOL 310) in the spring. In addition, she had four research students in her lab. Courtney Juliano ’04, an honors student, investigated the role of the small heat shock protein HSP27 in axon outgrowth in the zebrafish. Krista Harrison ’04, a winter study and spring semester independent study student, investigated the transcriptional regulation of the small heat shock proteins HSP27, HSPB2, and HSPB3. Kathryn Fromson ’06, a research assistant, studied adaptation of the heat shock response; and Meghan Ryan ’06, also a research assistant, worked on an assay to test for phosphorylation of HSP27. Ms. Harrison presented her work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting on Molecular Chaperones and the Heat Shock Response, May 5-9. Ms. Fromson will be presenting some of her work at the 6th International Meeting of Zebrafish Development and Genetics, July 29-Aug. 2, in Madison, WI. Ms. Fromson and Ms. Ryan will continue with their research this summer, along with three new students who will be joining the lab.

In addition to the above activities, Hutson published a research article in the journal Developmental Dynamics entitled “Two Divergent slit1 Genes in Zebrafish,” with collaborators from the University of Utah and RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. She was also invited to write a chapter on zebrafish retinotectal analysis for a special zebrafish issue of Methods in Cell Biology, which she and her coauthors completed this spring and will be published in the near future.

During this past year, Professor Dan Lynch continued his research on plant sphingolipid biochemistry. In September, he was awarded a four-year grant for $598,000 from the National Science Foundation for a collaborative project titled “The Synthesis and Function of Arabidopsis thaliana sphingolipids.” This is part of the 2010 project at the NSF to characterize the approximately 26,000 genes in the model plant Arabidopsis. This collaboration includes Professor Wendy Raymond of the Biology Department as well as Teresa Dunn at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD and Jan Jaworski and Ed Cahoon at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO. Lynch co-authored two papers with students, both appearing in Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics; one with Brooke Wright, Jonathan Snow and Theresa O’Brien; the other with Pamela Bromley, Yuneng Li and Catherine Sumner. Lynch also published two other articles with NSF collaborators that appeared in New Phytologist and in Annals of Botany. Lynch served as a reviewer for several journals including Plant Physiology, Plant Cell, and Biochimica et Biophysica Acta.

Assistant Professor Claire Ting joined the Biology Department in July 2003 and taught a new upper level seminar course Life at Extremes: Molecular Mechanisms (BIOL 414) during the fall. Through readings and critiques of recent research articles, students used an interdisciplinary approach to explore the molecular “survival kits” that permit organisms to thrive in environments such as the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, deserts, and the deep sea. In the spring, she offered another new course Integrative Plant Biology: Fundamentals and New Frontiers (BIOL 308), in which students used an integrative approach to understand the molecular mechanisms by which plants grow, develop, and respond to their environment. A key part of this course involved the development of a new plant biology laboratory program, which enabled students to apply concepts covered in lecture and to learn techniques used in plant biology research, from the molecular to the whole plant level.

During the year, Ting also set up a new laboratory for research on photosynthesis and on the response of photosynthetic organisms to abiotic stress. Research in the new lab is focused on how differences at the genome level between environmentally important marine cyanobacteria translate into selective physiological advantages in photosynthetic capacity and in tolerance to abiotic stress. Her proposal to characterize the molecular architecture of marine cyanobacteria was accepted by the National Center for the Visualization of Biological Complexity this fall, and Elizabeth Westly ’04 joined her laboratory in the spring to work on an independent study project investigating the effects of environmental stress on cyanobacteria ultrastructure. This work will be presented in part at the International Photosynthesis Congress in Montreal, Canada in August, and will be continued during the summer by Emily Russell-Roy ’06, Alana Frost ’06, and Bryce Inman ’05. Asst. Professor Ting has served on the Biochemistry/Molecular Biology advisory committee, the Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Proteomics advisory committee, the Maritime Studies concentration advisory board, and the Williams-Mystic Council. She has also served as an active reviewer for journals such as Photosynthesis Research and of grants for the National Science Foundation.

Heather Williams attended the annual bird song workshop at the Rockefeller University Field Research Center and presented work that formed part of Jess Tierney’s ’03 honors thesis, which contributed to defining the basis of laterality in vocal production in songbirds. In the fall, a paper on the role of testosterone in limiting plasticity in the learned song of adult male zebra finches, co-authored with two former students, Denise Connor ’99 and Jennifer (Danforth) Hill ’97 appeared in Hormones and Behavior. The paper was featured on BioMedNet, a web site that highlights a few papers each week from among a wide variety of journals. Professor Williams’ lab continued its investigation of the neural basis of song learning. Maria Kerr ’05 pursued the question of whether zebra finches learn to time their courtship dances to their songs and Whitney Johnson ’06 continued a project initiated by Courtney Hunter ’03 looking into the question of whether the degree of variability and flexibility in a bird’s song is inherited. Two honors, Greg DelPrete ’04 and Tory Hendry ’04 put in long hours in the lab. Greg used multi-unit recordings from the song centers in the brains of adults to examine adults’ potential for brain and behavioral plasticity, and Tory used microsatellite and dominant markers to investigate the genetic structure of house finch populations.

Professor Williams co-taught Introduction to Neuroscience (BIOL 212) with Professor Betty Zimmerberg of the Psychology Department in the fall. With the help of Dr. Luis Schettino, they upgraded and revised the laboratory program so that students receive an introduction to all aspects of neuroscience using a variety of animal models. In the spring, Professor Williams offered Animal Behavior (BIOL 204) to a large flock of students, who investigated red-winged blackbird behavior during the traditional early morning hours. They found that males responded more aggressively to the songs of neighbors than to the songs of strangers – a result that contradicts those obtained in the past, and may be due to intense competition for territories that extended throughout the spring season - long after territories have usually been established.

Professor Williams served as a reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, and reviewed manuscripts for several journals.

Steve Zottoli taught Neurobiology (BIOL 304) in the fall and Animal Physiology (BIOL 205) in the spring. An independent laboratory project was integrated into the laboratory of both courses.

He continued to direct the HHMI grant to Williams College, although he will be relinquishing that duty to Professor Wendy Raymond.

Last summer, he directed the Williams College Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) program, which is funded by Howard and Nan Schow, the HHMI grant, and the Essel Foundation grant to Williams. Six students spent 9 weeks at the MBL attending lectures, seminars and participating in an original research project. The six students were co-authors on a short note published in the Biological Bulletin. At the MBL, Zottoli served as a member of the search committee for a chief academic and scientific officer at the MBL.

He continued as the President of The Grass Foundation, a not-for-profit philanthropic organization that funds various programs in neuroscience. In addition, he is on the External Advisory Board for Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network program for the state of New Mexico, funded by the NIH.

He continues as a faculty member in the Summer Program in Neuroscience, Ethics and Survival course at the MBL.