New Team Science Leadership Program aims to form new collaborations among mid-career faculty8/31/2023 CLICK HERE TO READ ON IGB WEBSITE The Team Science Leadership Program is a new program being offered by the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, consisting of a series of workshops that bring together faculty from all over campus. The workshops are tailored to mid-career faculty, and focus on leadership training, communication skills, networking, and community building. The ultimate goal of the program is to empower faculty to develop new research ideas and collaborations, particularly between disciplines that might otherwise never have the opportunity to interact. “Nationwide there is increasing interest in focusing on the professional development of mid-career faculty, and this program addresses this need for our faculty from the unique perspective of multi-disciplinary team science, which is the IGB’s calling card,” said IGB Director Gene Robinson.
James O’Dwyer, an associate professor of plant biology and the Director of Graduate Studies, was the driving force behind the program’s creation. O’Dwyer explained that after the COVID-19 pandemic, many faculty, especially those new to the university or that recently received tenure, were eager to renew pre-pandemic connections and build new ones with other departments and IGB themes. The TSLP was formed to bring people together and connect faculty from different disciplines across the campus. “This program builds on what the IGB does best—team science at a large scale—to develop new skillsets among our mid-career faculty,” said O’Dwyer. “We hope that the program will help build community and enhance the leadership skillsets among our faculty, forming the next generation of leaders in team science at the IGB and Illinois.” O’Dwyer organized a few preliminary TSLP workshops along with Robinson in Spring 2023 to gauge interest and collect feedback from participants. After a successful trial run, the TSLP was established as a certificate program for the IGB, which will begin workshop sessions Fall 2023. The workshops will be led by experts who will discuss different aspects of team science, including how to create a healthy and productive team, crafting proposals that highlight a team’s strengths, and building effective teamwork skills. Experts include experienced faculty on campus, alongside program officers from federal agencies, private foundations, and other professions working in team science. The format of the workshops will vary based on the topic, but usually workshops will involve smaller group discussions followed by larger conversations between the whole group, said O’Dwyer. At the end of the year-long program, participants will receive a certificate. The program already has 15 participants registered for this year’s cohort. “James has done an outstanding job of assembling a program of topics and experts that participants should find to be very educational and engaging,” said Robinson. “We look forward to learning about their experiences as we seek to make this program available for the long-term.” The program is open to IGB affiliated faculty that are either associate professors or recently promoted full professors. The first workshop of the year will be held on September 22 at noon in 612 IGB. For more information about the upcoming program, visit https://www.igb.illinois.edu/team-science-leadership-program
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CLICK HERE TO READ ON IGB WEBSITE Researchers are realizing that animal communication is more complicated than previously thought, and that the information animals share in their vocalizations can be complex. For example, some animals produce calls that warn of specific dangers in the environment, such as a predator, and these calls can even contain information about the type of predator (e.g. flying vs ground predator). These calls are known as referential calls. “Referential calls are a type of symbolic signal that is considered by some to be an evolutionary precursor of more complex communication systems, including human language,” said Mark Hauber (GNDP), a professor of evolution, ecology, and behavior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
It is still not completely clear whether and how animals learn referential calls, though evidence suggests animals need experience with the threat being referenced in order to connect the call to it. In a new study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, researchers tested this using a population of birds that have been living apart from a specific threat for over 300,000 years. In North America, yellow warblers produce referential “seet” calls which warn of nearby brown-headed cowbirds. Cowbirds are brood parasites, meaning that instead of making a nest and raising their own young, they leave their eggs in other species’ nests, forcing those hosts to care for the cowbird. When yellow warblers spot a nearby cowbird during the breeding season, they produce seet calls to warn each other about the threat and increase their vigilance around their nests. Yellow warblers also seet call in response to seet calls from others to pass on the warning. While this behavior is common in temperate North America, where yellow warbler and cowbird breeding overlaps, seet calls are more rarely produced by warblers in northern Canada and Alaska, where cowbirds do not breed. This suggests that experience with cowbirds may be necessary for yellow warblers to produce and respond to referential seet calls. Researchers at Illinois, along with collaborators from Western Michigan University and Australia’s Flinder’s University, decided to test this hypothesis using a yellow warbler population in the Galápagos Islands, where the population has been breeding apart from cowbirds for over 300,000 years. “We were very interested in how experience plays a role in ability to seet call,” said Shelby Lawson, a previous graduate student in the Hauber lab, now a postdoctoral science writer fellow at the IGB and first author on the paper. “We already know that experienced, older yellow warblers produce more seet calls in response to cowbirds, and are more responsive to seets than younger birds. But what about warblers from a population that has never experienced brood parasitism? We wondered if they would be able to recognize the seet call as a warning call for danger.” “The Galápagos population has been isolated from brood-parasitic cowbirds for hundreds of thousands of years,” explained Janice Enos, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Hauber lab, now an avian biologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey. “Because of that, it’s the best candidate population to ask about the propensity of warblers to seet call based on the presence of cowbirds, because every other yellow warbler population has had some experience with cowbirds. This is the only one that presumably hasn’t.” The researchers first found breeding pairs of yellow warblers on the islands of Santa Cruz and Floreana in the Galápagos. Then they presented playbacks of cowbird calls, seet calls, and controls that had been recorded in North America, along with playbacks of local Galápagos predators, to the pairs. The researchers measured and compared the aggression and vocalizations the warblers made in response to the playbacks, predicting that the birds would be most aggressive towards the threats they had experience with, and less towards the sounds that were novel. They found that the Galápagos yellow warblers were indeed much more aggressive towards playbacks of a local nest predator compared to cowbird and seet call playbacks, of which responses to were comparable to the controls. This response is unlike yellow warblers in North America, which are highly aggressive towards playbacks signaling nearby cowbirds, said Lawson. Surprisingly, Galápagos yellow warblers never once produced a seet call in response to the cowbird and seet call playbacks. The researchers say this was unexpected, as yellow warblers in northern Canada and Alaska that have been breeding apart from cowbirds for about 6000 years still occasionally produce seet calls when tested. “Other allopatric (meaning apart) yellow warbler populations still occasionally produce seet calls when shown cowbird models, albeit rarely, so the fact that the Galápagos yellow warbler never produced any seet calls was surprising to see,” explained Lawson. “The warblers did not seem to recognize the cowbird threat at all. One female warbler even fell asleep on her nest while a nearby speaker played cowbird calls!” The team says that this finding only leads to more questions to explore. The Galápagos yellow warbler split off from the mainland lineage so long ago that it begs the question of whether yellow warblers had even evolved the seet call prior to the split. According to the researchers, the Galápagos lineage could have split before the warblers developed the ability to seet call, which could explain why they did not respond to the call or produce it during the experiment. The researchers say future directions include testing other yellow warbler populations with varying overlap with cowbirds, in order to tease apart the role experience may play, and to identify when in the warbler’s evolution the seet call evolved. “Projects like these rely on national and international collaborators with different skill sets,” said Hauber. “Our team’s next step is to study the closest mainland relatives of the Galapagos yellow warblers, in Mexico or the Caribbean, which still coexist with parasitic cowbirds.” “This study gives us one of the pieces of the puzzle about the evolution of communication, especially complicated communication like referential calls,” said Enos. “It also brings up questions about whether the seet call is tied to genetic underpinnings, or if it is learned through social aspects that influence use of the call. We can't tease those two apart in this study, but this begins to fill in a little of that gap.” The study was supported by NSF, the Austrian Science Fund, and the Center for Latin American Studies at Illinois. The paper can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-023-03372-0 CLICK HERE TO READ ON IGB WEBSITE Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of how the human microbiome, or the collection of microbes the live on and inside of us, has a major connection to health and human physiology. Microbial engineering, which changes the structure of the microbiome through methods such as probiotics, antibiotics, and microbe transplants, has been found to be a useful strategy for improving human health, but the mechanisms underlying this improvement are still unclear and difficult to test. However, a team of researchers hopes that their new study, published in Microbiology Spectrum, will provide a platform that will make mechanistic studies on the microbiome more feasible. The study was conducted by the labs of Yong-Su Jin (BSD/MME/CABBI), a professor of bioengineering, and Michael Miller (MME co-leader/IGOH), a professor of food microbiology, based at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, along with first author Jungyeon Kim, a former postdoctoral researcher in Jin’s lab and now assistant professor at Seoul National University in South Korea. The researchers utilize a genetically engineered strain of Saccharomyces boulardii, a species of yeast, as their delivery vehicle, or ‘chassis,’ to deliver bioactive proteins into the gut. The yeast is commonly used as a probiotic, and the researchers say that it’s not only easy to genetically engineer, it also moves quickly through the gut, unlike other options for vehicles. “When we first started this study, many people were using a probiotic E. coli strain as their chassis,” said Kim. “The problem with E. coli is that it’s great at colonizing the gut, and can stay in the system for several months. Even after you have recovered from a disease, the E. coli could still be in the gut producing recombinant proteins, which can trigger immune responses and inflammation. S. boulardii on the other hand leaves the system in just 1-3 days. This feature of yeast makes it easy to control the supply of recombinant proteins.” The goal of the study was to genetically engineer the yeast to produce lysozyme, an antimicrobial protein that mammals naturally produce in milk, tears, saliva, and more. The researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to integrate the human gene for lysozyme directly into the yeast genome. The engineered yeast was then fed to mice for 2 weeks, and the microbiome of these mice was compared to mice fed either wild-type unengineered yeast or a saline solution. First, the researchers measured the presence of lysozyme in the gut and fecal matter of the mice fed the engineered yeast, to verify that the yeast was producing and delivering lysozyme into the gut. After verifying this, they measured the gut microbiome and fecal metabolome (the collection of metabolites microbes produce) of the mice across all three treatment groups. While the diversity of the microbiome increased across all groups, the mice fed either type of yeast saw significant increases in the diversity of microbes present in the gut, including increases in the ratio of gram-positive to gram-negative bacteria. The researchers say this is to be expected, due to the probiotic nature of the yeast. When they specifically examined the mice fed the lysozyme-secreting yeast, they found the structure of their gut microbiome and diversity of their fecal metabolome was significantly altered compared to mice fed saline or wild-type yeast. The researchers concluded that the lysozyme secretions by the yeast had indeed impacted the gut microbial community. “We found a dramatic increase in firmicutes, or gram-positive bacteria, compared to gram-negative bacteria in the mice fed S. boulardii,” said Kim. “We investigated whether there were changes to specific strains, and found that probiotic bacteria increased after administration of lysozymes. We also found increases in diversity of microbiome, and decreases in sugar found in blood in the mice given yeast. So, we’re thinking administration of this engineered yeast could be helpful for maintaining a healthy microbiome or preventing growth of pathogens.” “What’s cool is that we show that our engineered S. boulardii is able to produce proteins in the gut that significantly affect the microbiome,” said Miller. “But I think the bigger picture is that lysozyme is just a starting point. We can engineer the yeast to make any bioactive protein that we want, and have them deliver that cargo functionally to the gut.” The researchers say that the activity of the yeast could be improved, as they may not have had enough sugar or nutrients to proliferate fully within the gut. However, for a follow-up study the researchers added a new genetic pathway to the yeast that will allow them to utilize lactose, the sugar found in milk. The lactose can then be fed to the mice alongside the yeast to provide a new fuel source for the newly engineered yeast. The researchers have already found that doing so dramatically increases lysozyme production in the gut. In the future, the researchers are hoping to figure out how to deliver specific quantities of a target protein into the gut to be used in therapeutics. Jin says the ultimate goal of their research would be to utilize engineered yeast in “in-food fermentation,” such that the yeast that’s already in foods people enjoy, like baked goods, milk, and alcohol, would produce additional proteins that help maintain healthy gut microbiomes. “My vision is to use this engineered yeast in food,” said Jin. “We already use yeast for making bread, wine, beer and such. But if we create these fermented foods using engineered microorganisms designed to be helpful for the gut microbiome, we can enjoy the benefits of the engineered microorganism simply through the consumption of food.” The study was funded by the Korea Institute of Planning and Evaluation for Technology in Food, Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs, and the USDA. The paper can be found at https://doi.org/10.1128/spectrum.00780-23. |