BioScience 113

Small molecule modulation of splicing is a therapeutic modality to disrupt or restore expression of proteins. Although high throughput screening efforts can readily identify splice modulating compounds, optimizing them for splice site specific activity remains a key challenge. Here we present how we utilize RNA-mediated oligonucleotide annealing, selection, and ligation (RASLseq) to examine hundreds of exon junctions simultaneously and measure both on-target activity and specificity for thousands of conditions.

Brown recluse spiders are famous for bites that cause necrotic lesions. Our research advances knowledge about the evolutionary history of brown recluse and their relatives (biogeography) and uses that as a framework to understand where the venom toxins that cause lesions came from and how they have evolved new functions that make them toxic. I will answer the questions of how the brown recluse got to North America, when the venom toxin that causes necrosis originated in this lineage, and what we're learning about how that venom toxin affects insect prey.

"The Pacific island of Guåhan is the land of the Indigenous CHamoru people. This unincorporated territory – read “colony” of the United States— is also home to thousands of Filipinos who have settled on the island. This talk examines the relationships between CHamorus and Filipinos to think about the dynamics of settler militarism within the US empire.

There are well-established disparities in breast cancer preventative behavior and outcomes by racial and ethnic identity in the US, that result from the interplay between structural, socioeconomic, socio-environmental, behavioral, and biological dimensions. Large research studies designed to investigate factors contributing to cancer etiology and progression have mainly focused on populations of European origin.

As climate change is set to exceed the current physiological limits of many species, survival in future oceans will depend on the ability to acclimate, adapt, and/or migrate. However, this response may be further complicated by ecological interactions, such as symbioses, where the fate of two or more organisms are tied together. Cnidarians, such as coral and sea anemones, form a mutually beneficial relationship with microscopic algae, but this symbiosis breaks down under high temperature.

The flora and fauna on this planet are currently facing unprecedented environmental change. In response, species can go extinct, adapt, or move where they live. Species in the ocean are moving in response to recent anthropogenic impacts at a rate 6x faster than species in terrestrial ecosystems. However, there is immense variability around this average. Species vary in movement to new locations based on population size, traits such as reproductive strategy and mobility, and where they are living.

Among the many constituents of a plant’s environment, water is critical to the functionality of most of a plant’s physiological processes. Therefore, it is imperative to clarify how plants acquire, retain, utilize, and lose water to understand how these organisms will perform in a changing environment. The most salient metrics of plant responses to drought at leaf scale are pressure volume (PV) curve traits, estimated from the relationship between leaf water potential (Ψleaf), a common measurement of water stress, and relative water content (RWC).

The study of kinematics explicitly integrates the morphologies that organisms possess with motions they generate and is vital to our understanding of the evolution of functional systems. Traditional methods have primarily focused on detailed comparisons of relatively few taxa. I will discuss my recent work on an approach for evaluating complex biological motions in a manner amenable to both single species analysis and broad comparative study of kinematic diversity.

The sun is the ultimate source of energy for almost all forms of life on Earth, with about half of global primary productivity occurring in marine systems. While chlorophyll-based photosystems have been studied since the 19th century, the presence of rhodopsin (retinal-based) light harvesting complexes in marine environments was not known until the year 2000. Microbial rhodopsins are simple light-driven ion-pumps present in greater than 80% of the bacteria in the ocean’s photic zone and appear in all three domains of microbial life.

Insect interactions with host plants and other organisms provide unique and powerful models for understanding the evolutionary ecology of species interactions and molecular responses to stressors including host plant toxins, pathogens, and pesticides. I will present work investigating 1) the effects of plant toxins on specialist insect fitness and gene expression, and 2) the interactive effects of evolved pesticide resistance, pesticide exposure, and pathogen infection on insect fitness, immunity, and gene expression.