Experts in the News

In a new report by the led by Mark Hay and Cody Clements, the School of Biological Sciences researchers raised concerns about the overharvesting of sea cucumbers that can harm the coral reefs. According to the study published in Nature Communications, sea cucumbers are crucial to ensuring clean reef sediments and preventing the spread of microbial pathogens — and their apparent decline is bad news for coral reefs.

Coral reefs all over the world are in serious danger. However, a critical way to keep reefs healthy likely comes from an unexpected place: the humble sea cucumber. According to a study published February 26 in the journal Nature Communications led by School of Biological Sciences researchers Mark Hay and Cody Clements, about 25 percent of coral reef’s health is dependent on sea cucumbers that keep the reefs clean. 

A recent publication from the group of Prof. Dan Goldman made it to the Cover of Physical Review Letters vol. 132, issue 8 (https://journals.aps.org/prl/covers/132/8). The research article “Probing Hydrodynamic Fluctuation-Induced Forces with an Oscillating Robot”, by Steven W. Tarr, Joseph S. Brunner, Daniel Soto, and Daniel I. Goldman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 084001 was published on 20 February 2024, and was also selected as an Editor’s Suggestion (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.084001).

The CDC says right now, there is no routine screening or early diagnostic test for ovarian cancer. But that’s something that researchers like Jeffrey Skolnick and John McDonald at Georgia Tech's School of Biological Sciences are hoping to change. The researchers are developing a new test they say detects ovarian cancer with a 93% success rate. Skolnick explained that after patients give a blood sample, artificial intelligence scans the metabolic profile to determine the probability that someone does or does not have cancer. (The study was also covered at Diagnostics World and Clinical Research News.)

Ocean waters are constantly on the move, traveling far distances in complex currents that regulate Earth's climate and weather patterns. How might climate change impact this critical system? Oceanographer, College of Sciences Dean, and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair Susan Lozier dives into the data in her TED Talk. Her work suggests that ocean overturning is slowing down as waters gradually warm — and her talk takes us on board the international effort to track these changes and set us on the right course while we still have time.

Scientists have long wondered how some organisms seem to change very little, even over eons, despite 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, a biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The secret to the evolutionary success of organisms like plats, green algae, and cyanobacteria is light-harvesting proteins that harness energy from the sun. Long before photosynthetic proteins dominated the planet, another group of light-harvesting proteins made their debut: rhodopsins. Now, reporting in Current Biology, a team of evolutionary and synthetic biologists reenacted this process by transferring a rhodopsin gene from one eukaryotic species to another to see whether it still functioned in its unfamiliar host, offering a glimpse into how rhodopsins found their way into eukaryotic evolutionary history. Study authors include biology Ph.D. student Autumn Peterson, Research Scientist Anthony Burnetti, CMDI grant writer Carina Baskett, and Associate Professor William Ratcliff.

Comprehensively mapping the genetic basis of human disease across diverse individuals is a long-standing goal for the field of human genetics. A key limitation in efforts to build this catalogue has been the historic under-representation of large subsets of individuals in biomedical research including individuals from diverse ancestries, individuals with disabilities and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. The All of Us Research Program, which includes School of Biological Sciences Professor I. King Jordan, is a longitudinal cohort study aiming to enroll a diverse group of at least one million individuals across the USA, advancing the promise of genomic medicine for all.

You may be familiar with yeast as the organism content to turn carbs into products like bread and beer when left to ferment in the dark. In these cases, exposure to light can hinder or even spoil the process. In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences have engineered one of the world’s first strains of yeast that may be happier with the lights on. Study authors include biology Ph.D. student Autumn Peterson, Research Scientist Anthony Burnetti, CMDI grant writer Carina Baskett, and Associate Professor William Ratcliff.

Bolstered by state and national workforce needs and their promising return on investment, the STEM track represents a gold mine for colleges and universities that want to ensure credentials from their institution are providing students with good job prospects and gainful employment. Meanwhile, the humanities and social sciences are taking a back seat. But something exciting is happening in the world of higher education. Colleges and universities hailing from both sides of the fence are inching ever closer to the middle, integrating lessons in the humanities with STEM-based curriculum—and vice versa. School of Biological Sciences and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Julia Kubanek, who also serves as the Institute's vice president for Interdisciplinary Research, shared her thoughts on the positive impacts of this on institutions like Georgia Tech.

Ph.D. Robotics Student in Robotics Tianyu Wang and Postdoctoral Physics Scholar Christopher Pierce are developing snakelike, limbless robots. The robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors — and could readily move through confined and cluttered spaces such as debris fields, where walking or wheeled robots and human rescuers tend to fail.

Scientists have been trying to build snakelike, limbless robots for decades. These robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors. Georgia Tech researchers Tianyu Wang, a robotics Ph.D. student, and Christopher Pierce, a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Physics, recently shared how they go about building these robots, drawing inspiration from creatures like worms and snakes. Wang and Pierce work with Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. This story has been republished in Know Techie, IOT World Today and The Good Men Project.