BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

Chair Chat

by Professor Pat Vary

This has been a productive year in the department as I complete my first year as chair. We have expanded two undergraduate teaching laboratories into Faraday Hall West (the old Faraday) and have bought new equipment for several teaching laboratories, which was aided by contributions of alumni to the department. We are in the process of moving the Herbarium to Faraday, giving it expanded room (it has been housed in the halls of the 4th floor for several years) which allows for the plant taxonomy course to be taught in the same room. The anatomy labs in Anderson have been expanded from 24 to 36 students in anticipation of an increased physical therapy program. Biology's Professors Naples and Hubbard teach the anatomy portion of the PT curriculum with a new collaboration with Prof. Kay in PT. Dan Olson has completed an Ed.D. and has been appointed director of all the anatomy labs. He will also continue to be an integral part of the teaching. At a time when the university is seeing a decrease in enrollment, BIOS is increasing. We have over 700 majors (up from 335 four years ago) and about 80 graduate students. We have seven new Ph.D. students and 22 new M.S. students starting this fall. They come from Virginia Wesleyan, Bowling Green, UI Chicago (2), Korea (3), U Mich, China, Univ. North Carolina, UI Urbana (3), Central College, North Central College, Richard Stockton College, Loyola University, Northeast Missouri State, Elmhurst College, and NIU (9). We are proud that our faculty/student ratio is 19.3. In this department, almost all classes are taught by faculty, not TAs. When a TA teaches a lecture course, he/she is a senior Ph.D. student gaining experience needed for a career in college teaching. We usually have only one to two Ph.D. candidates teaching a freshman non-majors course per year.

The faculty has also been productive in research as you can see by the list of publications. In FY96 our faculty also submitted 41 grant proposals for a total of $8,025,275. Of these, 21 were funded for a total of $1,203,170. The department is going to have a new addition to our DNA synthesizing facility with an ABI Automatic Sequencer. This will allow several laboratories to sequence at a much accelerated rate and keep us on the cutting edge of molecular research in several fields, from evolution to AIDS research. Professor Hampel's ribozyme constructs are now being tested in AIDS patients. Professor Briles is in the process of developing an immunogenetics institute with NIU and possibly industrial support . You will see also that several faculty members have been traveling the world to expand their research, or to give papers at conferences.

We have also seen some personnel changes. Professor Steven Nadler decided that the West Coast had better weather and opportunities at UC Davis and moved there this spring. He was a great asset to the department whom we will miss. Professor Peter Jablonski, who works on the Archaea (the ancient bacteria that are now a separate kingdom), came here in January 1995, and has already become well established in his lab with graduate and undergraduate students, outside collaborations, and three new grants. Profs Gasser and Stafstrom were promoted to associate professors. You will see in the newsletter that we have also expanded our computer capabilities, thanks to Aline Click, Randy Rynkewicz, and Rich Becker, who have built and configured two departmental servers, an expanding homepage, and a new course in computing. Most of our graphics for journal articles, seminars, poster presentations, and slide talks at meetings are being generated by computer now. Rich Becker has recently been made assistant chair for business and operations, to better describe his actual responsibilities. I hope many of you can drop by for the open house during home-coming and see some of the laboratories and visit with faculty. We would love to have a column on alumni news, so drop us a line about yourself, or email us.

Professor Jozef J. Bujarski

Professor Jozef J. Bujarski, from the Plant Molecular Biology Center, is spending a half-year sabbatical leave at the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology of CNRS in Starsbourg, France, in the lab of Professor Lothaire Pinck. Professor Bujarski is studying the mechanism of RNA replication processes in nepoviruses. Specifically, he is investigating the role of a 28kD protein of grapewine fanleaf nepovirus (GFLV) in the viral life cycle by testing various mutations in the corresponding cDNA clones and ORFs. In addition, he is attempting to establish an efficient RNA recombination system in this virus in order to test a risk and the mechanism of genetic recombination in nepoviruses.

Professor Mike Parrish

Professor Mike Parrish, with John Flynn and Bill Simpson of the Field Museum and Andy Wyss of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is spending a month in western Madagascar looking for dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates. The crew has secured funding from National Geographic for the project, which will also involve a number of students from the University of Antananarivo. Huge areas of potentially fossiliferous rocks await the team, who anticipate spending a great deal of time walking around looking at the ground!

Professor Barbara Johnson-Wint

Professor Barbara Johnson-Wint was awarded a NASA-ASEE-Stanford Summer Faculty Fellowship for the summers of 1996 and 1997 to conduct research at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in Moffett Field, California. She is using the unique Hypergravity Facility for Cell Culture available at ARC to study how connective tissue cells detect force and how they generate force to organize collagen. NASA has observed that astronauts experience progressive degeneration of their bones, muscles and tendons while in the microgravity of space causing all of these tissues to become progressively weaker. These same degenerative changes occur on earth during normal aging and long periods of bed rest. Since a major component of these tissues that changes during degeneration is the structural protein collagen, Professor Johnson-Wint is using cells seeded into collagen gels in culture under controlled conditions to understand the role of forces, including gravity, on the collagen organization and strength of tissues. Understanding the fundamental cell biology of why our bones and tendons degenerate in space and under conditions of inactivity on earth will allow countermeasures to be taken to prevent it.

Professor Peter Meserve

Since 1989, Professor Meserve has been engaged in a long-term study of small mammal, vertebrate predator, and plant dynamics in a semiarid site in north-central Chile located in Parque Nacional Fray Jorge, about 80 km south of the coastal resort town of La Serena. This work has involved collaborations with several distinguished Chilean researchers including Professor Julio Gutierrez, a plant ecologist, Professor Fabian Jaksic, a vertebrate predator specialist, and Professor Luis Contreras, a physiological ecologist. Over more than seven years of work now, the project has yielded many significant results including verification of strong predator effects on some small mammal species, significant effects of small mammals and predators on the plant community, and spectacular increases and declines of all elements during and following an El Nino (ENSO) event in 1991-1992 with high episodic rainfall. The project has received diverse support from several awards from the National Science Foundation, Chile's counterpart agency (FONDECYT), the U.S. AID Biodiversity Program, EARTHWATCH, and Northern Illinois University. In addition to the participation of many Chilean and U.S. technicians, they have also enjoyed the help of student volunteers and EARTHWATCH participants. They are continuing the work during the long drought that has ensued since the 1991-1992 ENSO, now focusing efforts on demographic, ecological and genetic aspects of small mammal populations in this site, which has a climate much like that of arid mediterranean sites in southern California. Finally, in summer 1997, they plan to offer a field ecology course through NIU that will provide upper division undergraduate and post-undergraduate students opportunities to learn about the ecology of semiarid systems in an international setting. For more information, please contact Peter Meserve here at NIU.

International Presentations:

Professor Patricia S. Vary will be attending and presenting a paper on "The indigenous plasmid origins of Bacillus megaterium" at the Plasmid 96 meeting in Graz, Austria. She will then go to Erlonger, Germany to visit the lab of Wolfgang Hillen, with whom she has a NATO grant for B. megaterium catabolie repression, September 1-5, 1996.

Professor John Mitchell will be presenting "Antizyme interaction with stable ornithine decarboxylase of DH23b cells" as an invited address to the 1996 Tokyo International Symposium on Polyamines, October 21-25, 1996. Also, he is the chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Polyamines (an international conference), which will be held in New Hampshire, June 8-13, 1997. He will schedule a short presentation titled "Role of antizyme in feedback reguation of polyamine metabolism and transport."

Space... the Final Frontier...

The Department of Biological Sciences has grown significantly over the past decade and has concomitantly acquired additional "space resources" and undergone numerous renovations along the way. In 1969 biology moved into the south wing of the new Montgomery Hall, co-resident with the NIU School of Nursing, which occupied the north wing. Expansion of biology's teaching and research programs, along with the development of the Plant Molecular Biology Center (PMBC) in the late 80s and early 90s, seriously impacted the limited space available to the department in Montgomery south. Recognizing biology's growth potential, the university acquired and renovated the old Robert's Elementary School on Normal road. This allowed for relocation of the School of Nursing, and subsequent expansion of the biology program into the north wing of Montgomery Hall in 1987. Biologys administrative offices were relocated to the north wing, allowing for the construction of research facilities in the vacated space. Additionally, the north wing provided for dedicated instructional classrooms, faculty offices and a recently completed student computing laboratory.

Supplemental facilities for plant research were acquired in 1988 with the construction of a 1,700 sq.ft. external greenhouse facility which complements the original ground-level and penthouse greenhouses. The new greenhouse was designed to comply with USDA containment guidelines for experimentation involving virally infected and genetically engineered plants and has allowed for the successful pursuit of numerous external grants in these areas.

More recently, relocation of various elements of the chemistry and physics departments into the newly constructed Faraday Hall West facility again provided an opportunity for biology to acquire "a little elbow room." Within the last year biology has been assigned additional space "just across the crick" (Watson-Crick, that is) on the ground and third floors of "old" Faraday Hall. This new area currently houses a general biology instructional lab and an expanded human anatomy instructional lab. Currently underway is the relocation of biology's fixed botanical collections to a dedicated Herbarium and development of an associated plant taxonomy instructional lab, also in Faraday Hall. This expansion of our teaching facilities has greatly reduced the load on Montgomery lab resources, and should enhance our students' instructional laboratory experience.

If you haven't visited in the last decade, feel free to stop by for the "10 minute" tour; you'll barely recognize the place!