Biology Department News
In 2024, the Biology Department welcomed their newest faculty members:
Boris Tezak, Assistant Professor of Biology
Maria Sbaraglini, Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology
Sonia Sultan presented two lectures in the UK during September 2024. At the Origins Federation conference of the Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe at University of Cambridge, Prof. Sultan presented a keynote talk on The organism-environment relationship as a feature of life to a multi-disciplinary audience of biogeochemists, astrophysicists, and exoplanetary scientists (including two Nobel Prize recipients). Prof. Sultan was also the featured speaker at a panel event held at Westminster Abbey as part of their public education series, on the role of the environment in human health and well-being.
During Wesleyan University's May 2024 commencement, the Biology Department saw 3 PhD students, 4 BA/MA students, and 40 undergraduate majors receive their diplomas.
In 2023-2024, Frederick Cohan published two reviews relating to the origins of bacterial species and discovery of bacterial diversity: an entry on bacterial species concepts in Oxford Bibliographies and a path toward fully discovering and characterizing all of bacterial diversity, in Genetics and Evolution of Infectious Diseases. He also published a review of species concepts in Brenner’s Encyclopedia of Genetics.
Recent Publications
August 2024
Faculty member: Michael Singer
PhD graduate: Riley Anderson
Riley Anderson (PhD '23), Andrew Hennessy (BA '21/MA '22), Kiran Kowalski (BA '23), and Michael Singer (Professor of Biology) published a new article in Current Biology, showing a bizarre ecological interaction among insects on oak trees. A bit of background: about 20% of oak-feeding caterpillars typically die from parasitic wasps and flies, which can help control the populations of herbivores, such as caterpillars, that might otherwise defoliate trees. The research team found that the presence of treehoppers, which feed on the tree’s phloem sap, acts like a toggle switch that turns off this parasitism of caterpillars. Amazingly, just removing or adding two small treehoppers is enough to switch on or off parasitism of dozens of oak-feeding caterpillars living on the same individual trees. How does this happen? The article shows that feeding by treehoppers suppresses the oak tree’s emission of volatile organic compounds, which serve as olfactory cues used by parasitic wasps to find their caterpillar hosts. This surprisingly potent ecological effect of treehoppers is a type of keystone effect that was not previously known to occur in the oak forests of the Northeast.
May 2024
Faculty members: Michael Weir, Kelly Thayer (College of Integrative Sciences) and Danny Krizanc (Mathematics and Computer Science)
PhD student: Mitsu Raval
A cross-disciplinary collaboration of eleven current and recently-graduated students—Joyce Sun, Pete Hwang, Eric Sakkas, Evelyn Zhou, Luis Perez, Ishani Dave, Jack Kwon, Audrey McMahon, Mia Wichman, Mitsu Raval and Kristen Scopino—working with Professors Michael Weir (Biology), Kelly Thayer (College of Integrative Sciences) and Danny Krizanc (Mathematics and Computer Science) has led to a publication in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences entitled "GNN Codon Adjacency Tunes Protein Translation." This study, bringing together computational and molecular biology analyses, investigates how a recently discovered interaction surface in the ribosome machine acts as a sequence-dependent braking system for tuning the rates of protein translation.
March 2024
Faculty member: Frederick Cohan
PhD students: Fatai Olabemiwo & Siddhant Kalra
The lab of Frederick Cohan published an exploration of bacterial diversity in soil from a Connecticut landfill. They developed a system for enriching landfill soil for plastic-degrading microbes and enzymes. A phylogenetic analysis revealed novel candidate phyla and genera. In addition to two PhD students, eight undergradute students are listed co-authors on this publication.
February 2024
Faculty member: Ni Y. Feng
Feng lab published a paper entitled "Neural control of fluid homeostasis is engaged below 10°C in hibernation" in Current Biology. This paper examined neural activation during the torpor-arousal transition in thirteen-lined ground squirrels, providing in-vivo evidence that the hypothalamic-pituitary axis is engaged at body temperatures below 10°C to maintain fluid homeostasis. The co-first author, Maddy Junkins, is a Wesleyan alum who recently completed her PhD in the Gracheva lab at Yale. Another co-author, Evie Curtis (Biology major, Informatics and Modeling minor, '24 ), was a Feng Lab member who was instrumental in analyzing and graphing the neural data from fiber photometry experiments.
October 2023
Faculty member: Frederick Cohan
PhD student: Fatai Olabemiwo
The lab of Frederick Cohan published a study showing that two Bacillus species have the dual beneficial properties of supporting growth of crop plants and degrading plastics. This suggests that agriculture could employ plant-growth-promoting bacteria that can remove tiny plastic particles emanating from massive plastic sheets spread over huge expanses of farmland. In addition to one PhD student, two undergraduate students are listed co-authors on this publication.
August 2023
Faculty members: Sonia Sultan & Joe Coolon
PhD graduate: Tim Earley
Recent Sultan lab PhD recipient Dr. Tim Earley (PhD '24, currently a postdoc in the Chernoff lab) published part of his thesis research in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society (Biology) in a paper titled, "The relative impact of parental and current environment on plant transcriptomes depends on type of stress and genotype." The paper presents results of a collaborative transcriptomics study by Earley and Sultan with former postdoc Mariano Alvarez, Assoc. Prof. Joe Coolon, and Dr. Nathalie Feiner at University of Lund, Sweden (now a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany).