Experts in the News

Five years after the "murder hornet” (Vespa mandarinia,) was first spotted in Washington state, the U.S. has declared the invasive species eradicated.

In an article published in Futurity, Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences Professor Mike Goodisman explained that eradicating the “murder hornet” will help the U.S. avoid a potential agricultural and commercial disaster due to the murder hornet’s threat to the already-declining honeybee population. 

“A threat to the honeybee population would be a commercial disaster,” Goodisman says. “Honeybees are critical in agriculture for pollinating a great variety of the foods we eat, and if we don’t have these pollinators, then we wouldn’t have many of the foods—fruits especially—that we are used to.”

The eradication of the hornet is a significant achievement, but Goodisman says it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will not re-emerge. Murder hornets can hibernate in various materials, cargo ships, and other commercial transportation, which can unknowingly spread invasive species worldwide.

Researchers at Georgia Tech including James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences were conducting a study of Cuban brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Florida when suddenly, a new species appeared on the scene: the Puerto Rican crested anole (Anolis cristatellus).

The subsequent Georgia Tech-led study of the two species and how they adapted to fill different roles, provides some of the clearest evidence to date of evolution in action.

“When two similar species compete for the same resources, like food and territory, they often evolve differences that allow them to coexist,” says Stroud, lead author of the study. "Most of what we know about how animals change in response to this process comes from studying patterns that evolved long ago. This was a rare opportunity where we could watch evolution as it happened.”

Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and the School of Physics including Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando, Assistant Professor Karl Lang, and post-doctoral researcher Micah Schaible are among the authors of a paper recently published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech demonstrated that space weathering alterations of the surface of lunar samples at the nanoscale may provide a mechanism to distinguish lunar samples of variable surface exposure age.

In an article published in Medical Xpress, Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry discussed the cryo-electron microscopy technology behind an important research discovery that could help create new drugs to lower "bad" cholesterol and hopefully prevent heart attacks and stroke.

Associate Professor Aditi Das and Professor MG Finn explained in an email that cryo-electron microscopy technology represents a revolution in biology and biochemistry because it allows scientists to determine the structures of biological molecules in great detail.

"When we know their structures, we have a big clue as to how they work, how to fix them if they are defective, or how to stop them if they cause harm. Nature is the supreme molecular architect, and we need techniques like cryo-EM to see the details of what she builds," Finn explained.

Research with this tool is going to have serious health benefits, the NIH said, because it allowed them for the first time to see how "bad" cholesterol, known as low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol or LDL-C, builds up in the body, and causes heart attacks and strokes in people who have genetically high LDL cholesterol.

(This story also appeared in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.)

A recent profile in Forbes, highlights Georgia Tech and its many strengths, including job placement and corporate engagement:

“By luring tech companies to Atlanta while simultaneously growing its enrollment, the Georgia Institute Of Technology is creating a super-sized rival to MIT, Caltech, and Stanford and fueling Silicon Valley South.”

Georgia Tech has received a rapid grant of more than $86,000 from the National Science Foundation to study air-monitoring data the university conducted during the BioLab incident in Rockdale County this fall. Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences deployed a mobile monitoring station at the city of Conyers' request shortly after the fire started on Sept. 29. The blaze lasted about two and a half weeks, created a plume of chemicals that wafted over the county and parts of metro Atlanta, and has prompted more than 20 class-action lawsuits blaming the company for illnesses and business closures.

Professor Greg Huey and his research group plan to calibrate and study the data, make it accessible to the public, identify as many compounds as possible that were in the plume, and prioritize reviews based on toxicity.

(This story also appeared at Atlanta Business Chronicle.)

Lipid-protein interactions are crucial for virtually all biological processes in living cells. However, existing structural databases focusing on these interactions are limited to integral membrane proteins. A systematic understanding of diverse lipid-protein interactions also encompassing lipid-anchored, peripheral membrane and soluble lipid binding proteins remains to be elucidated. 

To address this gap and facilitate the research of universal lipid-protein assemblies, researchers including School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Assistant Professor Andrew C. McShan developed BioDolphin — a curated database with over 127,000 lipid-protein interactions. BioDolphin provides comprehensive annotations, including protein functions, protein families, lipid classifications, lipid-protein binding affinities, membrane association type, and atomic structures.

Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip. People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

In this article, Ph.D. student in the School of Psychology Yiren Ren discusses recently published research, which has uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion, and memory. 

(This story also appeared at The Washington Post, Neuroscience News, and inkl.)

Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden may look serene at first glance, but beneath the resplendent orchids and majestic banyans, two invasive lizards are waging a turf war.

The war started a few years ago when Cuban brown anoles, who have called South Florida home for about 100 years, came face to face for the first time with a new rival: crested anoles from Puerto Rico.

As the two species, which look almost identical and occupy the same ecological niche, faced off, biologists were able to document who was winning, and more importantly, how quickly the losers were adapting to survive on new turf.

A new study published in Nature Communications by researchers, including School of Biological Sciences Assistant Professor James Stroud, reveals that the losing species is adapting at a rapid pace, changing their behavior, but also their bodies. This fast adaptation is altering what we know about how evolution works.

(This story also appeared in Futurity and New Atlas.)

Environmental journalist and author Ben Goldfarb reveals the story of how one biologist spread a non-native species of lizard across the Northeast. According to Goldfarb, Queens College professor of biology Jon Sperling secretly captured, bred, and released Italian wall lizards for many years. 

“Regardless of how much you love lizards—and I love lizards a lot—you can’t do that,” says James Stroud, assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences. “They are incredible organisms to watch, and they’re beautiful. I can understand his perspective, but I can’t agree with his actions.”

Last week, Michael Wong and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution for Science welcomed a diverse group of nearly 100 scientists, from microbiology to neuroscience, for a workshop on how complexity emerges and evolves. It was also a referendum on their audacious proposal, which, Wong said in a talk, is “an explanatory framework for the evolution of physical systems writ large, including, but not limited to, biology.”

It’s an appealing idea, says Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry who studies the origin of life and attended the workshop. “To me it seems very clear that there is evolution outside of biology.” Take the polypeptide backbone, the chain of molecules that forms the spine of all amino acids, he says. “[Biological] evolution doesn’t touch that, right? It’s the same in everything alive. It always has been. But it’s a product of evolution, I’m convinced.” It’s just that the evolution happened before life began, he says. And so when Hazen and his co-authors proposed their overarching theory, he says, “that just resonated with me.”

DNA samples from one of the world’s largest and oldest plants — a quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) in Utah called Pando — have helped researchers to determine its age and revealed clues about its evolutionary history.

“It’s kind of shocking to me that there hasn’t been a lot of genetic interest in Pando already, given how cool it is,” says study co-author William Ratcliff, an associate professor in the  School of Biological Sciences.

By inputting Pando’s genetic data into a theoretical model that plots an organism’s evolutionary lineage, the researchers estimated Pando’s age. They put this at between 16,000 and 80,000 years. “It makes the Roman Empire seem like just a young, recent thing,” says Ratcliff.

(This also appeared at Newsweek and NewScientist.)