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In a new study, published in GEN Biotechnology titled, “Changes in Gene Network Interactions in Breast Cancer Onset and Development,” researchers from the School of Biological Sciences and the Integrated Cancer Research Center (Zainab Arshad, Stephen N. Housley, Kara Keun Lee, and John F. McDonald) have identified differential gene-network changes characteristic of the three most prevalent molecular subtypes of breast cancer, Luminal A, Luminal B, and the highly metastatic Basal-like subtype. In contrast to previous studies, the authors expanded their analysis beyond genes differentially expressed between normal and cancer samples, as differential gene expression may not be a prerequisite for changes in gene-gene interactions.
GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News | 2024-04-18T00:00:00-04:00
A surge in tools that generate text is allowing research papers to be summarized for a broad audience, and in any language. But some scientists feel that improvements are needed before we can rely on AI to describe studies accurately. Will Ratcliff, an associate professor at the School of Biological Sciences, argues that no tool can produce better text than can professional writers. Although researchers have different writing abilities, he invariably prefers reading scientific material produced by study authors over those generated by AI. “I like to see what the authors wrote. They put craft into it, and I find their abstract to be more informative,” he says.
Nature Index | 2024-03-20T00:00:00-04:00
In new research published in Nature Communications, School of Biological Sciences researchers Mark Hay and Cody Clements and their colleagues demonstrated that when sea cucumbers were removed from coral reef, tissue death of Acropora pulchra, a species of staghorn coral, more than tripled, and mortality of the whole colony surged 15 times. The reasoning is that sea cucumbers are like "little vacuum cleaners on the reef" digesting and eliminating microbes that can lead to coral disease and demise — threats that are exacerbated by a warming and increasingly polluted ocean.
NPR | 2024-03-13T00:00:00-04:00
Evolution can perform spectacular makeovers: today's airborne songbirds descended from the wingless, earthbound dinosaurs that roamed millions of years ago, for example. But some organisms seem to change very little, even over eons. Scientists have long wondered how these species withstand the pressures of natural selection. The prevailing hypothesis for this “stasis paradox” has been that natural selection keeps some species unchanged by selecting for moderate or average traits (so-called stabilizing selection) rather than selecting for more extreme traits that would cause a species to change (directional selection). But a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA contradicts this idea, showing that evolution constantly favors different traits in seemingly unchanging animals that improve short-term survival. In the long term, though, “all that evolution cancels out and leads to no change,” says the study's lead author, James Stroud, assistant professor and Elizabeth Smithgall-Watts Endowed Faculty in the School of Biological Sciences.
Scientific American | 2024-02-05T00:00:00-05:00
Eighteen-year-old Anu Iyer, a recent Little Rock, Ark., high school graduate now studying for her bachelor's degree at the School of Biological Sciences, has collaborated with a University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) research team and is the lead author for a research study in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature portfolio journals. The publication stems from Iyer’s work with other researchers using machine learning to detect Parkinson’s disease. Iyer was able to confirm the reliability of telephone voice recordings to detect Parkinson’s. The UAMS study team collected telephone voice samples from 50 people diagnosed with Parkinson’s and 50 healthy control participants, then applied machine learning classification with voice features related to phonation.
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences News | 2024-01-30T00:00:00-05:00
A major bottleneck in early detection is the molecular heterogeneity between ovarian cancer (OC) patients, which limits the likelihood of identifying individual biomarkers that are shared among patients. In a new study “A personalized probabilistic approach to ovarian cancer diagnostics,” published in Gynecologic Oncology, researchers from Georgia Tech have addressed this challenge by applying machine learning (ML) on patient metabolic profiles to identify biomarker patterns for personalized OC diagnosis. The Georgia Tech researchers include John McDonald, Professor Emeritus, School of Biological Sciences; Dongjo Ban, a Bioinformatics Ph.D. student in McDonald’s lab; Research Scientists Stephen N. Housley, Lilya V. Matyunina, and L.DeEtte (Walker) McDonald; and Regents’ Professor Jeffrey Skolnick, who also serves as Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology. (The study was also covered at The New York Post, Technology Networks, Medical Xpress, News-Medical.net, Medscape and Diagnostics World.)
Inside Precision Medicine | 2024-01-26T00:00:00-05:00
Joe Mendelson, adjunct professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of research at Zoo Atlanta, writes about a study currently underway at the zoo on play behavior in diamondback terrapins. Play behavior is exactly the way someone would interpret it as a human — something that’s fun and silly and sometimes is for a purpose, and sometimes the purpose seems to be simply fun. Students from Georgia Tech and Georgia State University are helping Mendelson in making these observations, and they're hoping to make the case soon that they've documented purposeless play behavior in a turtle.
Zoo Atlanta | 2024-01-24T00:00:00-05:00
Yeast is maybe the best-understood microorganism in the world. Humans have leveraged yeasts' biochemical abilities to produce bread, alcohol, and fermented milk products since the dawn of civilization. Yeasts are also one of the most common organism “models” in biology laboratories. And important bio-factories for plenty of medicines and useful biomolecules. Still, yeasts need to be fed with sugar or other compounds to stay alive. At least, that was true until Anthony Burnetti, a research scientist working in the lab of William Ratcliff’s, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, managed to make yeast able to harvest the energy of light. The story highlights the potential impact of the research on biofuel production.
Securities.io | 2024-01-23T00:00:00-05:00
By lassoing lizards, putting tiny chips on their legs, and tracking them for three years, Georgia Tech’s James Stroud revealed why species often appear unchanged for millions of years despite Charles Darwin’s theory of constant evolution. Darwin said that evolution was constantly happening, causing animals to adapt for survival. But many of his contemporaries disagreed. Everything changed in the past 40 years, when an explosion of evolutionary studies proved that evolution can and does occur rapidly — even from one generation to the next. Evolutionary biologists were thrilled, but the findings reinforced the same paradox: If evolution can happen so fast, then why do most species on Earth continue to appear the same for many millions of years? Stroud, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, set out to investigate it. (This research was also covered at Scientific American, Study Finds, India Education Diary, BNN Breaking, SciTechDaily, ScienceDaily, Earth.com, and Washington University/St. Louis.)
Technology Networks | 2024-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
What a strain is and how many strains make up a natural bacterial population remain elusive concepts despite their apparent importance for assessing the role of intra-population diversity in disease emergence or response to environmental perturbations. A research team sequenced 138 randomly selected Salinibacter ruber isolates from two solar salterns and assessed these genomes against companion short-read metagenomes from the same samples. In its paper published in Nature Communications, the team says its methodology and ANI thresholds outlined should represent a useful guide for future microdiversity surveys of additional microbial species. The researcher include Ph.D. Scholar Roth E. Conrad and Professor Kostas Konstantinidis, both in the School of Biological Sciences. Konstantinidis is also the Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Nature Communications | 2024-01-16T00:00:00-05:00
