"This is one of the only training programs in the country focused solely on pediatric bioengineering," says Michael E. Davis, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and director of the Pediatric Center for Cardiovascular Biology at Emory and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.  Nearly $500,000 in funding over five years will allow 10 talented undergraduate students each year from around the United States to work for a pediatric engineering project over the summer. The students also will shadow clinicians to better understand childhood diseases and receive training in scientific reading, writing, and scientific processes.

All interested students should apply directly to the Emory SURE Program by clicking HERE, and select the PERSE program.

A gene normally involved in the regulation of embryonic development can trigger the transition of cells into more mobile types that can spread without regard for the normal biological controls that restrict metastasis, the new study shows.

Analysis of downstream signaling pathways of this gene, called SNAIL, could be used to identify potential targets for scientists who are looking for ways to block or slow metastasis.

“This gene relates directly to the mechanism that metastatic cancer cells use to move from one location to another,” said Michelle Dawson, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If you have a cell that overexpresses SNAIL, then it can potentially be metastatic without having any environmental cues that normally trigger this response.”

The study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and was published December 9 in The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).

Previously, Dawson and Daniel McGrail, the lead author on the new study, published a study showing how ovarian cancer cells respond to the mechanics of their bodily environment. Their data showed that ovarian cancer cells are more aggressive on soft tissues – such as the fatty tissue that line the gut – due to the mechanical properties of this environment. The finding is contrary to what is seen with other malignant cancer cells that seem to prefer stiffer tissues.

In the new study, the researchers show how overexpression of the gene SNAIL in vitro allows breast cancer cells to operate independently of the mechanics of the environment inside the body. Growing evidence suggests that cancer cells metastasize by hijacking the process by which cells change their type from epithelial (cells that lack mobility) to mesenchymal (cells that can easily move). In the new study, the researchers examined the biophysical properties of breast cancer cells that had undergone this epithelial to mesenchymal transition (through overexpression of SNAIL).

The research team measured the mechanical properties within the nucleus and cytosol of breast cancer cells, and then measured the surface traction forces and the motility of the cells on different substrates. They found that cells became much softer, which could help them spread throughout the body.

Dawson’s lab collaborated with the lab of John McDonald, a professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech, to use microarray analysis to examine changes in genes related to the observed biophysical changes. The researchers found that regardless of the substrate that the cells were grown on, cells that overexpress SNAIL look and act like aggressive cancer cells.

“We found that when the cells express SNAIL, they have biophysical properties that are similar to what we see for an activated metastatic cancer cell,” Dawson said.

Although SNAIL triggers a transformation that helps cells move from the primary tumor to the metastatic site, once the cell arrives at the metastatic site and that tumor starts to grow, SNAIL no longer helps cancer progress. Though becoming softer may help cells spread to the secondary site, they were no longer sturdy enough to form a secondary tumor.

“The cells need to transfer back to the epithelial state so they can withstand solid stress,” Dawson said.

The researchers hopethat their unique blend of microarray analysis and characterization of physical changes in breast cancer cells undergoing metastasis could aid the search for ways to block or slow the spread of cancer.

“We think this work has great potential to lead to a new approach to cancer therapeutics,” said McDonald, who is also the director of the Integrated Cancer Research Center at Georgia Tech.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award numbers 1032527, 1411304 and DGE-0965945. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agency.

CITATION: Daniel J. McGrail, et al., “SNAIL-induced epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition produces concerted biophysical changes from altered cytoskeletal gene expression.” (FASEB, December 2014) http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2014/12/07/fj.14-257345.abstract

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The designation honors those who “have demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.”

Prausnitz was chosen for the honor based on his revolutionary work in drug delivery technologies, especially microneedles, which are tiny needles (about 400 to 700 microns long) that can be designed as skin patches that provide a simple, painless and inexpensive way to administer influenza, polio, measles and other vaccines. Microneedles also can be prepared for microinjection into the eye for highly targeted therapies designed to increase drug effectiveness and safety.

“Our laboratory not only strives to advance scientific understanding and provide research training to students but also seeks to make inventions that can benefit society,” Prausnitz said.

Prausnitz will be honored at the NAI Fellows Luncheon and Induction Ceremony at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena on March 20. The event is part of the organization’s annual conference.

Prausnitz also was named to the list of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds this year.

When the disguised peptides are needed to launch biological processes, the researchers shine ultraviolet light onto the molecules through the skin, causing the “hat” structures to come off. That allows cells and other molecules to recognize and interact with the peptides on the surface of the material.

This light-activated triggering technique has been demonstrated in animal models, and if it can be made to work in humans, it could help provide more precise timing for processes essential to regenerative medicine, cancer treatment, immunology, stem cell growth, and a range of other areas. The research represents the first time biological signals presented on biomaterials have been activated by light through the skin of a living animal, and could provide a broader platform technology for launching and controlling biological processes in living animals.

“Many biological processes involve complex cascades of reactions in which the timing must be very tightly controlled,” said Andrés García, a Regents Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and principal investigator for the project. “Until now, we haven’t had control over the sequence of events in the response to implanted materials. But with this technique, we can deliver a drug or particle with its signal in the ‘off’ position, then use light to turn the signal ‘on’ precisely when needed.”

Supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the research was reported December 15, 2014, in the journal Nature Materials. It resulted from collaboration between scientists from Georgia Tech and the Max-Planck Institute in Germany through the Materials World Network Program.

When biomaterials are introduced into the body, they normally stimulate an immune system response immediately. But the researchers used molecular cages like hats to cover binding sites on the peptides that are normally recognized by cell receptors, preventing recognition by the animal’s cells. The cages were designed to detach and reveal the peptides when they encounter specific wavelengths of light.

During the five-year project, the research team – which included Ted Lee and Jose Garcia from Georgia Tech and Aranzazu del Campo from Max-Planck – modified peptides that normally trigger cell adhesion to present the molecular cage in order to disguise them. They showed that disguised peptides introduced into animal models on biomaterials could trigger cell adhesion, inflammation, fibrous encapsulation, and vascularization responses when activated by light. They also showed that the location and timing of activation could be controlled inside the animal by simply shining light through the skin.

The work involved numerous controls to ensure that the triggering observed by the researchers was actually done by exposure of the peptides – not the light, or the removal of the protective cage. The researchers also had to demonstrate that the “hats” were stable enough that they didn’t come off spontaneously, but only when the link between the molecular cage and the peptide was severed by the ultraviolet light.

Among the experiments was use of the peptide to attract cells that would attach themselves to the biomaterial. “We showed that if we left the hat on, there would be few cells attracted to the material, García said. “But when we take the hat off, we recruited a lot of cells to the material. That shows we can activate the peptide, and that the activation has a biological consequence.”

Another experiment showed that the timing of peptide activation could affect the quantity of fibrosis, an immune system response that builds a protective capsule around an implanted biomaterial. By delaying the exposure of the peptides until after the bulk of the inflammation reaction had taken place, the thickness of the fibrosis capsule was significantly reduced, allowing it to be better incorporated into the body.

In another experiment, the researchers showed that removing the hats could trigger the growth of blood vessels into the material. This vascularization is critical in regenerative medicine, but must take place at the right time to be successful.

“We showed that if you keep the hat on, you get no vessel in-growth into the material,” explained García. “But if we turn on the light, we get growth of new blood vessels into the material. We can control what happens and when it happens by when we expose the protective cages to light.”

In the future, photochemists at the Max-Planck Institute will be working on alternative cages that would be triggered by different wavelengths of light. As much as 90 percent of the ultraviolet light used in the experiments was lost in passing through the skin of the animal model, limiting the use of that wavelength to locations immediately below the skin.

Development of alternate “hats,” the molecular cages that protect the peptides, could allow sequential activation by light, and light activation of molecules at locations deeper inside the body.

Light, heat, and electricity have been used to trigger biological processes in vitro, García noted. Light is especially useful because it can be patterned to control processes spatially, which is also important because the processes must occur not only at the right time, but also the right place.

“The technique we developed is a general strategy that we can apply to other biological signals to see if they have similar spatio-temporal effects,” said García. “We see this as a beginning. From here, there are many, many applications that we can follow.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research involved Ankur Singh, Edward Phelps and Asha Shekaran from Georgia Tech, and Julieta Paez, Simone Weis and Zahid Shafiq from the Max-Planck Institute. Lee now works for Dexcom, a San Diego-based company that focuses on continuous glucose monitoring systems for use by people with diabetes, and Singh is currently an assistant professor at Cornell University.

The research was supported by the Materials World Network Program of the National Science Foundation under grants DFG AOBJ 569628 and NSF DMR-0909002, by the National Institutes of Health under grants R01-AR062368 and R01-AR062920, and by the NIH Cell and Tissue NIH Biotechnology Training Grant T32-GM008433. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.

CITATION: Lee, Ted, et al., “Light-triggered in vivo Activation of Adhesive Peptides Regulates Cell Adhesion, Inflammation and Vascularization of Biomaterials,” Nature Materials 2014.

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Filefish evade predators by feeding on their home corals and emitting an odor that makes them invisible to the noses of predators, the study found. Chemical camouflage from diet has been previously shown in insects, such as caterpillars, which mask themselves by building their exoskeletons with chemicals from their food. The new study shows that animals don’t need an exoskeleton to use chemical camouflage, meaning more animals than previously thought could be using this survival tactic.

“This is the very first evidence of this kind of chemical crypsis from diet in a vertebrate,” said Rohan Brooker, a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “This research shows that you don’t need an exoskeleton that for this kind of mechanism to work.”

The study was published December 10 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study was sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Ecological Society of Australia. The work was done as a part of Booker’s doctoral research at James Cook University in Australia. 

Anyone who has watched a nature documentary has seen insects that camouflage themselves as sticks, protecting the insects against predators that use vision to hunt for prey. But many animals see the world through smell rather than sight, and cunning critters from among them have adapted clever ways of smelling like their surroundings. A certain species of caterpillar, for example, smells like the plant that it lives on and eats. The caterpillar incorporates chemicals from the plant into its exoskeleton. Ants hunting for the caterpillar will walk right over it, none the wiser.

For the new study, researchers traveled to Australia’s Lizard Island Research Station in the Great Barrier Reef, where they collected filefish. To show that filefish smelled like their home coral, the researchers recruited crabs to sniff them out. The filefish were fed two different species of coral; each species of coral is home to a unique species of crab. The crabs were given a choice between a filefish that had been fed the crab’s home coral and a filefish that had been fed a coral that is foreign to the crab. The crabs always sought the filefish that had been feeding on the crabs home coral. The filefish smelled so strongly of coral that sometimes the crabs were attracted to the fish instead of coral, when given a choice between the two.

“We can tell that there is something going through the filefish diet that’s making the fish smell enough like the coral to confuse the crabs,” Booker said.

To see if the chemical camouflage gives the filefish an evolutionary advantage to evade predators, the researchers tested cod to see how they responded to filefish that had been fed various diets. Cod, filefish and corals were put in a tank, with the filefish hidden from the cod. When the filefish diet didn’t match the corals in the tank, the cod were restless, suggesting that they smelled food. When the filefish diet matched the corals in the tank, the cod stayed tucked away in their cave inside the tank.

The next step in the project is to learn how filefish can smell like coral without the benefit of an exoskeleton. Some evidence shows that amino acids in the mucus of fish – where much of their smell originates – will match their diet, but much work remains to tease apart this pathway.

“We have established that there is some kind of pathway from filefish diet to filefish odor,” Booker said. “This is just the first study. There’s a lot of work still to be done to understand how it works.”

Booker is now working in the lab of Danielle Dixson, an associate professor of biology at Georgia Tech.

This research is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Ecological Society of Australia. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: Rohan Brooker, et al., “You are what you eat: diet-induced chemical crypsis in a coral-feeding fish.” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, December 2014). http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1799/20141887

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Jerry Grillo
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Outstanding BioE Student Paper

• All BioE students are eligible - Must be currently enrolled
• $750 cash and plaque award
• Nominated by Advisor - nominations must include a letter of support from advisor discussing impact and significance of the work
• Electronic copy of paper must accompany nomination
• Paper must be published, in press or accepted in the time frame January 1 - December 31, 2014

Outstanding BioE PhD Thesis

• All BioE students are eligible - Do not have to be currently enrolled 
• $750 cash and plaque award
• Nominated by Advisor
• Nominations must include a letter of support from advisor
• Electronic copy of Ph.D. thesis must accompany nomination
• Thesis Certificate of Completion form must be signed by ALL committee members in the time frame January 1 - December 31, 2014

Outstanding BioE Advisor

• All BioE Program Faculty are eligible
• $500 discretionary funds and plaque
• Nominated by graduate student(s) – Submit a letter explaining why you are nominating a faculty member. 

Christopher Ruffin Leadership Award

The Student Leadership Award was established to honor the memory of Christopher Ruffin and his exceptional contributions to the BioE Program. Chris began working at GT in 1994 and joined the bioengineering community in April 2001. As Academic Advisor in the BioE Program, Chris worked tirelessly to support the BioE students and faculty.  This award recognizes a current graduate student for his or her superior contributions to the BioEngineering Program. The Leadership Award will be awarded to a student whose influence, ideals and activities throughout his/her time in the BioEngineering Program has left a long lasting and positive impression on the institution and has raised the standard of excellence for future BioEngineering classes. Examples of strong leadership qualities include activities such as peer mentoring, teaching, and service.

Nominations should be submitted to Laura Paige with the BioE program. Nominations for the Outstanding Awards will be reviewed by the BioE Faculty Advisory Committee and nominations for the Ruffin Leadership Award will be reviewed by a BGA committee. Winners will be announced at the BioE Reception on March 27, 2015 (Recruitment Day).

Now, more than ever, those opportunities are plentiful in biosciences at Georgia Tech, where researchers are creating medical devices for children, understanding how diseases occur, improving vaccines, and building better biomaterials for drug delivery. Georgia Tech’s unique blend of engineering, biology, chemistry, and computing — along with partnerships with world-class medical facilities in Atlanta, such as Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta — has transformed the Institute’s campus into a magnet for bio-minded scientists.

“What we bring to the table is a new perspective in the biological sciences that is data driven, that is quantitative, that focuses on devices and techniques and on being unafraid to ask fundamental questions,” said Ravi Bellamkonda, the chair and professor of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “It’s a different approach to biology as an engineer.”

The rise of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech has created a ripple effect across the biosciences on campus. Biologists studying genetics, ecology, and personalized medicine are collaborating with engineers to solve challenging medical problems. The bio quad, home to the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB); the U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building; the Ford Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T) Building; and the Molecular Science and Engineering (M) Building, already forms a hub of interdisciplinary research. Soon, other collaboration-oriented buildings will be added, solidifying the Institute’s commitment to developing its bioscience portfolio, which touches everything from mechanical engineering, to electrical engineering, to materials science and engineering.

Bioscience the Georgia Tech way has attracted high-profile faculty, such as M.G. Finn, pioneer of click chemistry and rumored Nobel Prize candidate. Also flocking to campus are fresh young minds, such as Susan N. Thomas, an assistant professor in the new field of immunoengineering. These researchers and others, who might not have come to Georgia Tech even 10 years ago, say that the Institute is already making a dent in some of the world’s biggest medical challenges, and is poised to do more. Nascent fields of research, such as immunoengineering, systems biology, pediatric bioengineering, chemical biology, and biomanufacturing, are emerging strengths on campus, positioning Georgia Tech to help define what these fields become. Georgia Tech is already recognized as a leader in regenerative medicine, cardiovascular engineering, neuroengineering, and mechanobiology.

“Considering what had been done in the past 10 years, I thought the next 10 years at Georgia Tech would be pretty exciting,” said Finn, the interim chair and professor of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Very few places in the world — if anywhere — will embed fundamental science in with applications science and technology better than we do here.”

Read more of this article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

A new National Science Foundation-supported project will provide computational tools designed to help identify and characterize the gene diversity of the residents of these microbial communities. The project, being done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Michigan State University, will allow clinicians and scientists to compare the genomic information of organisms they encounter against the growing volumes of data provided by the world’s scientific community.

The tools will be hosted on a web server designed to be used by researchers who may not have training in the latest bioinformatics techniques. A prototype system containing a limited number of computational tools is already available at http://enve-omics.ce.gatech.edu and is attracting more than 500 users each month.

“Across many areas of science, we are dealing with communities of microorganisms, and one challenge we’ve had is to identify them because we haven’t had good tools to tell apart individual microbes from the mixtures,” said Kostas Konstantinidis, an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech and the project’s principal investigator. “Our tools will be designed to deal with the genomes of whole communities of organisms.”

Current techniques identify individual microbes by examining their small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) genes, but the new tools will allow scientists to analyze entire genomes and meta-genomes.

“With the dawn of the genomic era, we can now get the whole genome of these organisms to see not only the ribosomal RNA, but also all the genes in the genome to get a better understanding of what the each organism’s potential might be,” said Konstantinidis. “There will be many advantages for looking at all the genes instead of just one, the SSU rRNA, such as to identify which organisms encode toxins or the enzymes for breaking down pollutants.”

Collaborators on the three-year project include scientists who operate the Ribosomal Database Project at Michigan State University: Jim Tiedje, director of Michigan State University’s Center for Microbial Ecology and James Cole, a Michigan State University research assistant professor and director of the Ribosomal Database Project.

The ability to identify and enumerate the organisms in complex communities using culture-independent, genomic technologies and associated bioinformatics algorithms is becoming more important as scientists study organisms that can’t be grown in the lab. The majority of the world’s organisms resist traditional lab culture, meaning they have to be studied in the field and identified through genetic information.

Konstantinidis and his research group are studying such communities in the water of lakes in Chattahoochee River system in Georgia and elsewhere. They are examining how these communities respond to perturbations, such as oil or pesticide spills, and the role that different members of the community play in breaking down pollutants.

“These tools actually come from our research practice,” said Konstantinidis. “We came to the point where we couldn’t process the data to answer the questions we wanted to ask. That led us to this new project to develop the tools we and others need to interrogate the data and get the information we are looking for.”

A single liter of lake water may contain as many as 500 different species, and together, their genomic information can total tens of billions of gene-coding letters. From Lake Lanier alone, the team has generated 200 gigabytes of genomic data.

“We want to figure out what organisms are there, and what genes they encode,” Konstantinidis explained. “The tools we are developing will allow us to do this.”

The tools developed in the project will be useful to both clinical microbiologists and environmental researchers. “This will not be specific to any one discipline,” he said. “As long as people are working with microbes, this will be helpful to them because some of the questions are universal.”

The system will also be built to provide user-friendly help to scientists who may not have training in the latest genomic and bioinformatics techniques. “There is a big need for big data analysis, and there are not many trained people right now,” Konstantinidis said. “These tools will make the lives of researchers easier.”

Among the challenges ahead is building an infrastructure able to handle the growing amounts of genomic information produced worldwide.

“We will have to develop some computational solutions for the problems of keeping up with all the new data becoming available,” said Konstantinidis. “We need to make tools that have high throughput to keep up with data volumes that are increasing geometrically.”

The system will initially operate on servers at Georgia Tech and Michigan State University, but if demand and data grow, additional resources may be sought, such as the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE supercomputer.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award DBI-1356288. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the National Science Foundation.

Kostas Konstantinidis is the Carlton S. Wilder Junior Faculty Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

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Ten years ago, Evans suffered a stroke that left him with limited mobility. Over the past two years, he’s been working with Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, to develop and test robots that help him shave, adjust a blanket when he’s cold, and even scratch an annoying itch.

“We did things with the robots that I never could have imagined,” said Evans, who contacted Kemp after seeing him on a CNN broadcast about health care robots.

Robots working directly with people – even helping them shave – is both challenging and unusual. Most robots today work in manufacturing facilities where, for safety reasons, they stay far away from humans. But Georgia Tech robotics researchers believe people and robots can accomplish much more by working together – as long as the robots have common sense to know, for instance, how much force humans apply when shaving.

“A major challenge for health care robots is that they lack so much of the knowledge and experience that people take for granted,” said Kemp. “To us, it’s just common sense that everybody has; for robots, it’s a serious impediment.”

Giving robots common sense is just one milestone on the path to the kinds of collaboration that will be required to meet the needs of a growing population of older persons. Beyond personal care, the benefits of co-robotics are many. To produce better products more efficiently, manufacturing robots will need to team up with humans, each contributing unique abilities. And in defense and homeland security, robots will increasingly have to take on the dangerous jobs, leveraging people’s skills while protecting them from harm.

Read more of this article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

The Atlanta-based team was awarded for development of iDETECT (integrated Display Enhanced TEsting for Cognitive Impairment and mTBI), a rapidly deployable, easily administered, comprehensive system designed to improve neurologic assessment following mild traumatic brain injury, such as concussion sustained in athletic events and military conflict.

A total of seven winners of Head Health Challenge II were announced November 13, 2014. The winning teams, selected from more than 500 submissions, will receive $500,000 each for development of new innovations and technologies intended to identify, measure and mitigate brain injury. The first round of winners will be eligible for an additional $1 million after a second phase of judging.

iDETECT addresses feasibility and reliability drawbacks associated with current concussion screening tools. It is an easy-to-administer, portable, and immersive system that integrates multiple concussion tests within one platform. The next generation iDETECT system will be further tested in a clinical study comparing iDETECT outcomes against other traditional separate mTBI screening tools.

“Our team is excited and honored to be selected as a winner in the NFL-GE-UA Head Health Challenge II competition,” says Tamara Espinoza, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and principal investigator of the Head Health Challenge award. “A tremendous amount of research and effort has gone into the development of iDETECT, and we believe it may become an essential tool in assessing sports-related concussion.”

Of the 1.7 million traumatic brain injuries in the United States each year, more than 750,000 are considered “mild,” and over 173,000 are related to recreational and sports activity. In the last decade, emergency department visits for mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) among highly vulnerable populations, such as children and developing youth, have increased by more than 60 percent.

“Adequately assessing mTBI using individual, single-pathway screening methods is extremely difficult, given the complexities of neurologic injury,” says Shean Phelps, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “With this additional funding from the Head Health Challenge II, our team can more fully pursue the long-term vision of iDETECT as a multi-modal device that addresses sports-related, mild traumatic brain injury.”

The DETECT project was the brainchild of David Wright, director of Emergency Neurosciences at Emory University School of Medicine and Michelle LaPlaca, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. In 2011, the project evolved from a single neurocognitive approach for detection of concussions to an extended, multi-modal platform when the partnership broadened to include the Georgia Tech Research Institute. GTRI added critical systems engineering, human factors and military medical operational expertise.

“Mild traumatic brain injuries in youth, college and professional sports have the potential for life-changing, long-term consequences,” says Wright. “The iDETECT system integrates multiple concussion testing capabilities within one platform and allows rapid and reliable assessment at the location where the injury occurred.” This comprehensive approach enhances the ability to validate the on-field assessment platform and more accurately screen for traumatic injury.

Phelps, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel adds, “mTBI assessments in the military is an area that needs new approaches such as those provided by iDETECT.”

Partner institutions forming the iDETECT team include Georgia Tech, Emory and the University of Rochester. The Department of Defense and the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation provided financial support for development of iDETECT.

In addition to Espinoza, Wright, LaPlaca and Phelps, team members include Brian Liu, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) research engineer; Stephen Smith, research engineer, Russell Gore, sports neurologist; John Brumfield, biomedical engineer; Jeff Bazarian, associate professor of emergency medicine, University of Rochester; and Courtney Crooks, GTRI senior research scientist.
Written by Emory University

The microneedles, ranging in length from 400 to 700 microns, could provide a new way to deliver drugs to specific areas within the eye relevant to these diseases. By targeting the drugs only to specific parts of the eye instead of the entire eye, researchers hope to increase effectiveness, limit side effects, and reduce the amount of drug needed.

For glaucoma, which affects about 2.2 million people in the United States and is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide, the goal is to develop time-release drugs that could replace daily administration of eye drops. A painless microneedle injection made once every three to six months – potentially during regular office visits – could improve treatment outcomes by providing consistent dosages, overcoming patient compliance issues.

In the second disease, corneal neovascularization, corneal injury results in the growth of unwanted blood vessels that impair vision. To treat it, the researchers developed solid microneedles for delivering a dry drug compound that stops the vessel growth.

“The power of microneedles for treating eye conditions is the ability to target delivery of the drug within the eye,” said Mark Prausnitz, a Regents’ professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We are developing different microneedle-based systems that can put the drug precisely into the part of the eye where it’s needed. In many cases, we hope to couple that delivery with a controlled-release formulation that would allow one application to treat a condition for weeks or months.”

The research, which was supported by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was reported November 13 in the journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science. The research was done using animal models, and could become the first treatment technique to use microneedles for delivering drugs to treat diseases in the front of the eye.

Glaucoma results from elevated pressure inside the eye that can be treated by reducing production of the aqueous humor fluid in the eye, increasing flow of the fluid from the eye, or both. Glaucoma is now controlled by the use of eye drops, which must be applied daily. Studies show that as few as 56 percent of glaucoma patients follow the therapy protocol.

The microneedle therapy would inject drugs into space between two layers of the eye near the ciliary body, which produces the aqueous humor. The drug is retained near the injection side because it is formulated for increased viscosity. In studies with an animal model, the researchers were able to reduce intraocular pressure through the injections, showing that their drug got to the proper location in the eye.

Because the injection narrowly targets delivery of the drug, researchers were able to bring about a pressure reduction by using just one percent of the amount of drug required to produce a similar decline with eye drops. The research team, which also included Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Yoo Chun Kim and Emory University Emeritus Professor of Ophthalmology Henry Edelhauser, hopes to produce a time-release version of the drug that could be injected to provide therapy lasting for months.

“The ultimate goal for us would be for glaucoma patients visiting the doctor to get an injection that would last for the next six months, until the next time the patient needed to see the doctor,” said Prausnitz. “If we can do away with the need for patients to use eye drops, we could potentially have better control of intraocular pressure and better treatment of glaucoma.”

To treat corneal neovascularization, the researchers took a different approach, coating solid microneedles with an antibody-based drug that prevents the growth of blood vessels. They inserted the coated needles near the point of an injury, keeping them in place for approximately one minute until the drug dissolved into the cornea.

In an animal model, placement of the drug halted the growth of unwanted blood vessels for about two weeks after a single application. In addition to the researchers already mentioned, the corneal neovascularization research included Emory University Professor of Ophthalmology Hans Grossniklaus.

While the research reported in the journal did not include time-release versions of the drugs, a parallel project is evaluating potential formulations that would provide that feature.

Eye injections with hypodermic needles much larger than the microneedles are routinely used to administer compounds into the center of eye. These injections are well tolerated, and Prausnitz expects the use of microneedles would also not cause significant side effects.

“Increasingly, eye drops are not able to deliver drugs where they need to go, so injections into the eye are becoming more common,” said Edelhauser. “But hypodermic needles were not designed for the eye and are not optimal for targeting drugs within the eye.”

In contrast to the larger hypodermic needles, the microneedles are tailored to penetrate the eye only as far as needed to deliver the drugs to internal spaces within the layers of the eye. For the glaucoma drug, for instance, the needle is only about half a millimeter long, which is long enough to penetrate through the sclera, the outer layer of the eye, to the supraciliary space.

Both potential treatments would require additional animal testing before human trials could begin.

Yoo C. Kim, Henry F. Edelhauser, and Mark R. Prausnitz hold microneedle patents, and Mark Prausnitz and Henry Edelhauser have significant financial interest in Clearside Biomedical, a company developing microneedle-based products for ocular delivery. This potential conflict of interest has been disclosed and is overseen by Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.

CITATIONS: Yoo C. Kim, Henry F. Edelhauser and Mark R. Prausnitz, “Targeted Delivery of Antiglaucoma Drugs to the Supraciliary Space Using Microneedles,” (Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 2014) and Yoo C. Kim, Hans E. Grossniklaus, Henry F. Edelhauser and Mark R. Prausnitz, “Intrastromal Delivery of Bevacizumab Using Microneedles to Treat Corneal Neovascularization,” (Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 2014).

Research reported in this news release was supported by the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers R01EY022097 and R24EY017045. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

The APDC is an FDA funded consortium based out of Georgia Tech (PI: David Ku), Emory University (co-PIs: Wilbur Lam, Kevin Maher), Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Virginia Commonwealth University (co-PI: Barbara Boyan) that provides a national platform to translate medical device ideas from concept to commercialization.  APDC’S mission is to enhance the lives of children through the development of novel pediatric medical devices, which are both save and effective.  The consortium provides an environment of creativity, where ideas are reviewed, tested, and developed.  

The application for seed grant funding begins with a written proposal, submitted to the APDC Innovation Competition Review Committee. Proposals are due on January 5, 2015, and selected investigators will be notified by January 30, 2015, of their selection for participation in the next round of the competition.

The second round is an opportunity for selected investigators to make a 5 minute oral presentation of their proposed idea/concept, to the review committee, an audience of peers, and the engineering and medical community in attendance. The investigators will be given advice on market size, product development, and regulatory submissions.  Proposal presentations will be held on the Georgia Tech campus on February 21, 2015.

Click here for more information and to Apply

In a study published in the October 10 issue of the journal Science, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Oregon State University, and Zoo Atlanta report that sidewinders improve their ability to traverse sandy slopes by simply increasing the amount of their body area in contact with the granular surfaces they’re climbing.

As part of the study, the principles used by the sidewinders to gracefully climb sand dunes were tested using a modular snake robot developed at Carnegie Mellon. Before the study, the snake robot could use one component of sidewinding motion to move across level ground, but was unable to climb the inclined sand trackway the real snakes could readily ascend. In a real-world application – an archaeological mission in Red Sea caves – sandy inclines were especially challenging to the robot.

However, when the robot was programmed with the unique wave motion discovered in the sidewinders, it was able to climb slopes that had previously been unattainable. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the Army Research Laboratory.

“Our initial idea was to use the robot as a physical model to learn what the snakes experienced,” said Daniel Goldman, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. “By studying the animal and the physical model simultaneously, we learned important general principles that allowed us to not only understand the animal, but also to improve the robot.”

The detailed study showed that both horizontal and vertical motion had to be understood and then replicated on the snake-like robot for it to be useful on sloping sand.

“Think of the motion as an elliptical cylinder enveloped by a revolving tread, similar to that of a tank,” said Howie Choset, a Carnegie Mellon professor of robotics. “As the tread circulates around the cylinder, it is constantly placing itself down in front of the direction of motion and picking itself up in the back. The snake lifts some body segments while others remain on the ground, and as the slope increases, the cross section of the cylinder flattens.”

At Zoo Atlanta, the researchers observed several sidewinders as they moved in a large enclosure containing sand from the Arizona desert where the snakes live. The enclosure could be raised to create different angles in the sand, and air could be blown into the chamber from below, smoothing the sand after each snake was studied. Motion of the snakes was recorded using high-speed video cameras which helped the researchers understand how the animals were moving their bodies.

“We realized that the sidewinder snakes use a template for climbing on sand, two orthogonal waves that they can control independently,” said Hamid Marvi, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon who conducted the experiments while he was a graduate student in the laboratory of David Hu, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Mechanical Engineering. “We used the snake robot to systematically study the failure modes in sidewinding. We learned there are three different failure regimes, which we can avoid by carefully adjusting the aspect ratio of the two waves, thus controlling the area of the body in contact with the sand.”

Limbless animals like snakes can readily move through a broad range of surfaces, making them attractive to robot designers.

"The snake is one of the most versatile of all land animals, and we want to capture what they can do," said Ross Hatton, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University who has studied the mathematical complexities of snake motion, and how they might be applied to robots. "The desert sidewinder is really extraordinary, with perhaps the fastest and most efficient natural motion we've ever observed for a snake."

Many people dislike snakes, but in this study, the venomous animals were easy study subjects who provided knowledge that may one day benefit humans, noted Joe Mendelson, director of research at Zoo Atlanta.

“If a robot gets stuck in the sand, that’s a problem, especially if that sand happens to be on another planet,” he said. “Sidewinders never get stuck in the sand, so they are helping us create robots that can avoid getting stuck in the sand. These venomous snakes are offering something to humanity.”

The modular snake robot used in this study was specifically designed to pass horizontal and vertical waves through its body to move in three-dimensional spaces.  The robot is two inches in diameter and 37 inches long; its body consists of 16 joints, each joint arranged perpendicular to the previous one.  That allows it to assume a number of configurations and to move using a variety of gaits – some similar to those of a biological snake.

“This type of robot often is described as biologically inspired, but too often the inspiration doesn’t extend beyond a casual observation of the biological system,” Choset said. “In this study, we got biology and robotics, mediated by physics, to work together in a way not previously seen.”

Choset’s robots appear well suited for urban search-and-rescue operations in which robots need to make their way through the rubble of collapsed structures, as well as archaeological explorations. Able to readily move through pipes, the robots also have been tested to evaluate their potential for inspecting nuclear power plants from the inside out.

For Goldman’s team, the work builds on earlier research studying how turtle hatchlings, crabs, sandfish lizards, and other animals move about on complex surfaces such as sand, leaves, and loose material. The team tests what it learns from the animals on robots, often gaining additional insights into how the animals move.

“We are interested in how animals move on different types of granular and complex surfaces,” Goldman said. “The idea of moving on flowing materials like sand can be useful in a broad sense. This is one of the nicest examples of collaboration between biology and robotics.”

In addition to those already mentioned, co-authors included Chaohui Gong and Matthew Travers from Carnegie Mellon University; and Nick Gravish and Henry Astley from Georgia Tech.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards CMMI-1000389, PHY-0848894, PHY-1205878, and PHY-1150760; by the Army Research Office under grants W911NF-11-1-0514 and W911NF1310092; and by the Army Research Lab MAST CTA under grant W911NF-08-2-0004; and by the Elizabeth Smithgall Watts endowment at Georgia Tech. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: Hamidreza Marvi et al., “Sidewinding with minimal slip: snake and robot ascent of sandy slopes,” Science 2014).

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu).
Writers: John Toon, Georgia Tech/Byron Spice, Carnegie Mellon University

To address that need, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Penn State University have developed an automated imaging technique for measuring and analyzing the root systems of mature plants. The technique, believed to be the first of its kind, uses advanced computer technology to analyze photographs taken of root systems in the field. The imaging and software are designed to give scientists the statistical information they need to evaluate crop improvement efforts.

“We’ve produced an imaging system to evaluate the root systems of plants in field conditions,” said Alexander Bucksch, a postdoctoral fellow in the Georgia Tech School of Biology and School of Interactive Computing. “We can measure entire root systems for thousands of plants to give geneticists the information they need to search for genes with the best characteristics.”

The research is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP) and Basic Research to Enable Agriculture Development (BREAD), the Howard Buffett Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Center for Data Analytics at Georgia Tech. The research was reported as the cover story in the October issue of the journal Plant Physiology.

Beyond improving food crops, the technique could also help improve plants grown for energy production, materials, and other purposes.

Root systems are complicated and vary widely even among plants of the same species. Analyzing critical root properties in field-grown plants has depended on manual measurements, which vary with observer. In contrast, automated measurements have the potential to provide enhanced statistical information for plant improvement.

Imaging of root systems has, until now, largely been done in the laboratory, using seedlings grown in small pots and containers. Such studies provide information on the early stages of development, and do not directly quantify the effects of realistic growing conditions or field variations in water, soil, or nutrient levels.

The technique developed by Georgia Tech and Penn State researchers uses digital photography to provide a detailed image of roots from mature plants in the field. Individual plants to be studied are dug up and their root systems washed clean of soil. The roots are then photographed against a black background using a standard digital camera pointed down from a tripod. A white fabric tent surrounding the camera system provides consistent lighting.

The resulting images are then uploaded to a server running software that analyzes the root systems for more than 30 different parameters – including the diameter of tap roots, root density, the angles of brace roots, and detailed measures of lateral roots. Scientists working in the field can upload their images at the end of a day and have spreadsheets of results ready for study the next day.

“In the lab, you are just seeing part of the process of root growth,” said Bucksch, who works in the group of Associate Professor Joshua Weitz in the School of Biology and School of Physics at Georgia Tech. “We went out to the field to see the plants under realistic growing conditions.”

Developing the digital photography technique required iterative refinements to produce consistent images that could be analyzed using computer programs. To support the goal of making the system available worldwide, it had to be simple enough for field researchers to use consistently, able to be transported in backpacks to locations without electricity, and built on inexpensive components.

In collaboration with a research team led by Jonathan Lynch, a professor of plant sciences at Penn State, the system has been evaluated in South Africa with cowpea and maize plants.

With its ability to quickly gather data in the field, it was possible to evaluate a complete cowpea diversity panel. Penn State collaborator James Burridge compiled a novel cowpea reference data set that consists of approximately 1,500 excavated root systems. The data set was measured manually to validate and compare with the new computational approaches. In the future, the system could allow scientists to study crop roots over an entire growing season, potentially providing new life cycle data.

The research shows how quantitative measurement techniques from one discipline can be applied to other areas of science.

“Alexander has taken rigorous, computational principles and collaborated with leading plant root biologists from the Lynch group to study complex root structure under field conditions,” said Weitz. “In doing so, he has shown how automated methods can reveal new below-ground traits that could be targeted for breeding and improvement.”

Data generated by the new technique will be used in subsequent analyses to help understand how changes in genetics affect plant growth. For instance, certain genes may help plants survive in nitrogen-poor soils, or in areas where drought is a problem. The overall goal is to develop improved plants that can feed increasing numbers of people and provide sustainable sources of energy and materials.

“We have to feed an ever-growing population and we have to replace materials like oil-based fuels,” Bucksch said. “Integral to this change will be understanding plants and how they provide us with food and alternative materials. This imaging technique provides data needed to accomplish this.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Larry York and Eric Nord from Penn State and Abraham Das from Georgia Tech.

This research was supported by NSF Plant Genome Research Program Award 0820624, the NSF/BREAD Program Award 4184-UM-NSF-5380, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Center for Data Analytics at Georgia Tech, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Any opinions or conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

CITATION: Alexander Bucksch, et al, “Image-based high-throughput field phenotyping of crop roots,” (Plant Physiology 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.1104/pp.114.243519

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

The Georgia Tech research isn’t the first to find that exercise can improve memory. But the study, which was just published in the journal Acta Psychologica, took a few new approaches. While many existing studies have demonstrated that months of aerobic exercises such as running can improve memory, the current study had participants lift weights just once two days before testing them. The Georgia Tech researchers also had participants study events just before the exercise rather than after workout. They did this because of extensive animal research suggesting that the period after learning (or consolidation) is when the arousal or stress caused by exercise is most likely to benefit memory.

The study began with everyone looking at a series of 90 photos on a computer screen. The images were evenly split between positive (i.e. kids on a waterslide), negative (mutilated bodies) and neutral (clocks) pictures. Participants weren’t asked to try and remember the photos. Everyone then sat at a leg extension resistance exercise machine. Half of them extended and contracted each leg at their personal maximum effort 50 times. The control group simply sat in the chair and allowed the machine and the experimenter to move their legs. Throughout the process, each participant’s blood pressure and heart rate were monitored. Every person also contributed saliva samples so the team could detect levels of neurotransmitter markers linked to stress.

The participants returned to the lab 48 hours later and saw a series of 180 pictures – the 90 originals were mixed in with 90 new photos. The control group recalled about 50 percent of the photos from the first session. Those who exercised remembered about 60 percent.

“Our study indicates that people don’t have to dedicate large amounts of time to give their brain a boost,” said Lisa Weinberg, the Georgia Tech graduate student who led the project.

Although the study used weight exercises, Weinberg notes that resistance activities such as squats or knee bends would likely produce the same results. In other words, exercises that don’t require the person to be in good enough to shape to bike, run or participate in prolonged aerobic exercises.

While all participants remembered the positive and negative images better than the neutral images, this pattern was greatest in the exercise participants, who showed the highest physiological responses. The team expected that result, as existing research on memory indicates that people are more likely to remember emotional experiences especially after acute (short-term) stress.

But why does it work? Existing, non-Georgia Tech human research has linked memory enhancements to acute stress responses, usually from psychological stressors such as public speaking. Other studies have also tied specific hormonal and norepinephrine releases in rodent brains to better memory. Interestingly, the current study found that exercise participants had increased saliva measures of alpha amylase, a marker of central norepinephrine.

“Even without doing expensive fMRI scans, our results give us an idea of what areas of the brain might be supporting these exercise-induced memory benefits,” said Audrey Duarte, an associate professor in the School of Psychology. “The findings are encouraging because they are consistent with rodent literature that pinpoints exactly the parts of the brain that play a role in stress-induced memory benefits caused by exercise.”

The collaborative team of psychology and applied physiology faculty and students plans to expand the study in the future, now that the researchers know resistance exercise can enhance episodic memory in healthy young adults.

“We can now try to determine its applicability to other types of memories and the optimal type and amount of resistance exercise in various populations,” said Minoru Shinohara, an associate professor in the School of Applied Physiology. “This includes older adults and individuals with memory impairment.” 

This research was supported in part by PHS Grant UL1 RR025008 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award Program, National Institutes of Health, National Center for Research Resource

Platelets respond to surfaces with greater stiffness by increasing their stickiness, the degree to which they “turn on” other platelets and other components of the clotting system, the researchers found.

“Platelets are smarter than we give them credit for, in that they are able to sense the physical characteristics of their environment and respond in a graduated way,” said Wilbur Lam, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The first author of the paper is research associate Yongzhi Qiu. Lam is also a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

The researchers’ findings could influence the design of medical devices, because when platelets grab onto the surfaces of catheters and medical implants, they tend to form clots, a major problem for patient care.

Modifying the stiffness of materials used in these devices could reduce clot formation, the authors suggest. The results could also guide the refinement of blood thinning drugs, which are prescribed to millions to reduce the risk of heart attack or stroke.

The team was able to separate physical and biochemical effects on platelet behavior by forming polymer gels with different degrees of stiffness, and then overlaying them each with the same coating of fibrinogen, a sticky protein critical for blood clotting. Fibrinogen is the precursor for fibrin, which forms a mesh of insoluble strands in a blood clot.

With stiffer gels, platelets spread out more and become more activated. This behavior is most pronounced when the concentration of fibrinogen is relatively low, the researchers found.

“This variability helps to explain platelet behavior in the 3D context of a clot in the body, which can be quite heterogenous in makeup,” Lam said.

Qiu and colleagues were also able to dissect platelet biochemistry by allowing the platelets to adhere and then spread on the various gels under the influence of drugs that interfere with different biochemical steps.

Proteins called integrins, which engage the fibrinogen, and the protein Rac1 are involved in the initial mechanical sensing during adhesion, while myosin and actin, components of the cytoskeleton, are responsible for platelet spreading.

“We found that the initial adhesion and later spreading are separable, because different biochemical pathways are involved in each step,” Lam said. “Our data show that mechanosensing can occur and plays important roles even when the cellular structural building blocks are fairly basic, even when the nucleus is absent.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Heart Association, the National Heart Lung & Blood Institute (U54HL112309, R01HL121264) and the National Eye Institute (PN2EY018244).

Media Relations Contacts: Emory University: Quinn Eastman (qeastma@emory.edu) (404-727-7829) or Georgia Tech: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986).

Writer: Quinn Eastman

• Gain in depth experience working with an global industry leader
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• Sophomores and above with a GPA of 3.0 or better. Students with freshman standing considered
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To be considered for these summer internship opportunities, interested GT candidates should FIRST submit their applications online to specific internship openings and then forward a resume directly to Floyd Wood at Georgia Tech indicating to which openings have been applied.


A unique, formal research relationship between one of the top public engineering schools (Georgia Tech) and a leading private medical school (Emory) was forged in 1987 with the establishment of the Emory/Georgia Tech Biomedical Technology Research Center. The partnership was further solidified in 1998 with creation of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues (GTEC, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center).

Since then, GTEC has given way to the latest and most ambitious joint effort in bio-research, with the launch in 2011 of the Center for Regenerative Engineering and Medicine (REM), which began as an initiative between Tech and Emory, but has grown in reach and potential with the recent addition of the University of Georgia (UGA). And that may not be the end of the expanding collaborative web.

“The addition of UGA is significant, and I would like to see the Center grow even further,” says Johnna Temenoff, who recently stepped into the REM co-director role at Tech. Each participating university has an REM co-director – Ned Waller represents Emory and Steve Stice is at UGA’s helm. “We have an opportunity to really turn this into a statewide initiative and perhaps garner even greater support for our work.”

The work of REM, which now utilizes the distinct strengths of three of the nation’s leading research universities, addressing a number of issues related to the body’s ability to heal itself, including the intra-articular delivery therapies for life-long healthy joints, biomaterials to prevent infection and reduce inflammation, reprogramming cells for tissue regeneration, stem cell processing and scale-up, cell therapies for improvement of patients with severe cardiac damage, implantable, biodegradable sensors to monitor tissue healing, functional restoration following severe limb trauma, implants that grow and adapt in pediatric patients, and nerve repair/regeneration.

Some of this research was the focus of discussion at last month’s annual REM Retreat, hosted in Athens at UGA for the first time. “We had such a strong turnout, and some great science was presented,” says Bob Guldberg, executive director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, and the previous Georgia Tech REM co-director. “The expanded partnership with UGA reflects the importance of collaboration between different institutions, and the change in leadership only added to the excitement at this year’s retreat.”

According to Stice, a true innovator in the area of stem cell research, about 110 researchers attended the annual event, and the participants from UGA come from a diverse range of specialties, which he believes exemplifies the state’s growing reputation in the field.

“Georgia has been and continues to be a hotbed of activity in regenerative medicine, and the REM presentations at the retreat were a great introduction for new members and faculty who want to work collaboratively,” Stice says. “I’m personally aware of contacts and projects that will work collaboratively in various areas, including orthopedics and cardiovascular treatments, among other things.”

This year’s retreat helped solidify an ambitious agreement between the collaborating universities. Tech and Emory had already laid the groundwork, creating an REM case statement that was supported enthusiastically by both university presidents. Says Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson, “Through applying regenerative technologies to unmet clinical needs, the collaborative partnership between Georgia Tech and Emory is changing the future – globally and for the individuals whose lives are enriched because of the research of some of the brightest minds in engineering and medicine working side by side.”

The case statement illustrated an unprecedented commitment made by Emory and Georgia Tech to work together on fundraising for regenerative engineering and medicine technology and clinical translation, according to Guldberg. And with UGA now a full-time partner in the endeavor, REM is in growth mode, which is just fine – and necessary – to Temenoff’s way of thinking.

“This is an interesting time to be moving into a leadership role,” Temenoff admits. “We know that we’ve got to grow our resources, in order to keep providing this conduit for collaboration between top researchers at all three universities. Overall, what we have now is an incredible partnership of three institutions engaged in synergistic research areas.”

So now, the three-headed REM will continue to build on the success first realized by Emory and Georgia Tech in tissue engineering, administered by the co-directors with support of a faculty leadership team consisting of preeminent investigators from each institution, including one of the pioneers of the tissue engineering and regenerative medicine field, Bob Nerem, former director of GTEC, which was funded by the NSF from 1998 to 2009.

Temenoff, who represents a new generation of leadership in the field, knows there are big shoes to fill, but likes the odds, due to the long-standing support of regenerative medicine research locally. “Because of the leadership of people like Bob Nerem and Bob Guldberg, collaborative research in regenerative medicine has become the expectation here at Georgia Tech,” she says, “That has certainly made stepping into this role very easy for me.”

A former member of the Puerto Rican national gymnastics team, it was an easy transition to “cheerleader” at Georgia Tech for Díaz Ortiz, who works football and basketball home games and engages in cheerleading team competition, which involves a lot of tumbling, flipping and throwing people in the air.

“I like to stay grounded, so fortunately, I’m not one of the people who gets thrown into the air,” says Diaz Ortiz, a 2014 Petit Scholar, who has found that her athletic endeavors help fuel the rest of her busy life at Tech. “Oh, it definitely keeps me in shape, keeps me healthy, which is pretty important with my high-pace schedule. But I like keeping a busy schedule. It helps make me more structured. And I love cheerleading because there is a real sense of community and bonding. I’ve got great teammates.”

Díaz Ortiz, a senior in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, sees a clear correlation between cheerleading and her work with mentor Chris Johnson in Andrés García’s lab at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Her independent research project is entitled, "A Critical Bone Defect Infection Model Utilizing an Engineered Bioluminescent Clinical Strain of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa."

“I definitely do see a parallel between cheerleading and my courses in biomedical engineering and work in the lab at the Petit Institute. You get to collaborate with people with diverse backgrounds and ideas,” she says. “Just within the lab, for example, are people who have biotech backgrounds working with mechanical engineers. You’ve got people with different strengths, working together on the same project. Same thing in cheerleading. You’ve got people who are stronger at tumbling, people who are stronger at putting other people up in the air. It’s interesting to see how people from so many different backgrounds can work so well together.”

When Díaz Ortiz arrived at Tech, she brought an interest in science, and liked the idea of doing research, but didn’t know if she wanted to be a research scientist or not. Then she interviewed with García for an opening in his lab for an undergraduate research assistant, and really dug it, and became interested in applying to the Petit Scholarship program – and the program wanted her. She was first invited to become a Petit Scholar for 2013, but at the same time, she was offered an internship with Abbott Laboratories and decided to defer her acceptance into the Petit Scholars program for a year.

“I really wanted to get a feeling for what industry was like,” she says. “I’d gotten the research experience, but didn’t have a feel for industry. It turned out to be a good learning experience for me, because it wasn’t quite what I expected, and honestly, it helped me cross out that idea.”

Planning to graduate in the spring, Díaz Ortiz is in the process of applying to M.D.-Ph.D. programs – ultimately, she wants to do clinical research.

“I haven’t decided where I want to go yet, but I’d prefer to stay near a city that is a hub of biomedical research,” she says. Her top three choices would be somewhere in Boston, California, or right here at the Tech/Emory joint biomedical engineering program. “Where ever I wind up, I feel like the Petit Scholarship experience has been good preparation for grad school. It’s definitely given me a feeling for what independent research is like."

The disposable self-testing device analyzes a single droplet of blood using a chemical reagent that produces visible color changes corresponding to different levels of anemia. The basic test produces results in about 60 seconds and requires no electrical power. A companion smartphone application can automatically correlate the visual results to specific blood hemoglobin levels.

By allowing rapid diagnosis and more convenient monitoring of patients with chronic anemia, the device could help patients receive treatment before the disease becomes severe, potentially heading off emergency room visits and hospitalizations. Anemia, which affects two billion people worldwide, is now diagnosed and monitored using blood tests done with costly test equipment maintained in hospitals, clinics or commercial laboratories.

Because of its simplicity and ability to deliver results without electricity, the device could also be used in resource-poor nations.

A paper describing the device and comparing its sensitivity to gold-standard anemia testing was published August 30, 2014, in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Development of the test has been supported by the FDA-funded Atlantic Pediatric Device Consortium, the Georgia Research Alliance, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Georgia Center of Innovation for Manufacturing and the Global Center for Medical Innovation.

“Our goal is to get this device into patients’ hands so they can diagnose and monitor anemia themselves,” said Dr. Wilbur Lam, senior author of the paper and a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine. “Patients could use this device in a way that’s very similar to how diabetics use glucose-monitoring devices, but this will be even simpler because this is a visual-based test that doesn’t require an additional electrical device to analyze the results.”

The test device was developed in a collaboration of Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology – all based in Atlanta. It grew out of a 2011 undergraduate senior design project in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. In 2013, it was among the winners of Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize, an innovation competition for undergraduate students, and won first place in the Ideas to SERVE Competition in Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business.

Using a two-piece prototype device, the test works this way: A patient sticks a finger with a lance similar to those used by diabetics to produce a droplet of blood. The device’s cap, a small vial, is then touched to the droplet, drawing in a precise amount of blood using capillary action. The cap containing the blood sample is then placed onto the body of the clear plastic test kit, which contains the chemical reagent. After the cap is closed, the device is briefly shaken to mix the blood and reagent.

“When the capillary is filled, we have a very precise volume of blood, about five microliters, which is less than a droplet – much less than what is required by other anemia tests,” explained Erika Tyburski, the paper’s first author and leader of the undergraduate team that developed the device.

Blood hemoglobin then serves as a catalyst for a reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction that takes place in the device. After about 45 seconds, the reaction is complete and the patient sees a color ranging from green-blue to red, indicating the degree of anemia.

The colors are produced by a redox-sensitive dye that complements the color arising from the hemoglobin, explained L. Andrew Lyon, who supported the work while he was chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry & Biochemistry. “It is the breadth of color space covered by the reaction that really enables the assay to be so reliable when read out by the naked eye,” said Lyon, who is now dean of the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University in California.

A label on the device helps with interpretation of the color, or the device could be photographed with a smartphone running an application written by Georgia Tech undergraduate student Alex Weiss and graduate student William Stoy. The app automatically correlates the color to a specific hemoglobin level, and could one day be used to report the data to a physician.

To evaluate sensitivity and specificity of the device, Tyburski studied blood taken from 238 patients, some of them children at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the others adults at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute. Each blood sample was tested four times using the device, and the results were compared to reports provided by conventional hematology analyzers.

The work showed that the results of the one-minute test were consistent with those of the conventional analysis. The smartphone app produced the best results for measuring severe anemia.

“The test doesn’t require a skilled technician or a draw of venous blood and you see the results immediately,” said Lam, who is also an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “We think this is an empowering system, both for the general public and for our patients.”

Tyburski and Lam have teamed up with two other partners and worked with Emory’s Office of Technology Transfer to launch a startup company, Sanguina, to commercialize the test, which will be known as AnemoCheck™. The test ultimately will require approval from the FDA. The team also plans to study how the test may be applied to specific diseases, such as sickle cell anemia – which is common in Georgia.

The device could be on pharmacy shelves sometime in 2016, where it might help people like Tyburski, who has suffered mild anemia most of her life. “If I’d had this when I was kid, I could have avoided some trips to the emergency room when I passed out in gym class,” she said.

About a third of the population is at risk for anemia, which can cause neurocognitive deficits in children, organ failure and less serious effects such as chronic fatigue. Women, children, the elderly and those with chronic conditions such as kidney disease are more likely to suffer from anemia.

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Elevated carbon dioxide levels impaired the odor-tracking behavior of the smooth dogfish, a shark whose range includes the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern United States. Adult sharks significantly avoided squid odor after swimming in a pool of water treated with carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide concentrations tested are consistent with climate forecasts for midcentury and 2100. The study suggests that predator-prey interactions in nature could be influenced by elevated carbon dioxide concentrations of ocean waters.

“The sharks’ tracking behavior and attacking behavior were significantly reduced,” said Danielle Dixson, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Sharks are like swimming noses, so chemical cues are really important for them in terms of finding food.”

The study is the first time that sharks’ ability to sense the odor of their food has been tested under conditions that simulate the acidity levels expected in the oceans by the turn of the century. The work supports recent research from Dixson and other research groups showing that ocean acidification impairs sensory functions and alters the behavior of aquatic organisms.

The study was published August 11 the journal Global Change Biology and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed into ocean waters, where it dissolves and lowers the pH of the water. Acidic waters affect fish behavior by disrupting a specific receptor in the nervous system, called GABA_A, which is present in most marine organisms with a nervous system. When GABA_A stops working, neurons stop firing properly.

Dixson’s previous research has shown that fish living on coral reefs where carbon dioxide seeps from the ocean floor were less able to detect predator odor than fish from normal coral reefs. Study co-author Philip Munday, from James Cook University in Australia, has shown in previous work that a tiny coral reef predator fish, the dottyback,also loses interest in food in waters that simulate ocean acidification conditions forecast for the future.

In the experimental part of the new study, conducted at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 24 sharks from local waters were studied in a 10-meter-long flume. The flume resembled two lanes of a swimming pool. Odor from a squid was pumped down one lane of the flume, while normal seawater was pumped down the other side.

Sharks tend to prefer one side of a tank over the other, so researchers first assessed each sharks’ side preference. Then the research team ran control experiments under normal ocean conditions to ensure that the sharks were tracking the food cue. Under present-day water conditions, sharks adjusted their position in the flume to spend a greater amount of time on the side containing the squid odor plume, regardless of the individual shark’s natural side preference.

Next, sharks spent five days in holding pools of three different carbon dioxide concentrations: local water concentration today (405 ± 26microatmospheres (µatms) CO₂), projected midcentury concentration (741 ± 22 µatms CO₂),projected concentration for 2100 (1,064 ± 17 µatms CO₂). Sharks were not fed while in the holding pools to ensure they were motivated to track a food odor. The sharks were then released into the flume and their tracking behavior was observed.

Sharks from the normal seawater pool and mid-level carbon dioxide pool spent more than 60 percent of their time in the water stream containing the food stimulus. Sharks from the high carbon dioxide pool spent less than 15 percent of their time in the water stream containing the food stimulus. These sharks avoided the odor plume even when it was on the side of the flume that the sharks’ naturally prefer.

The food odor stream was pumped through bricks to make the plume flow better and to give the sharks a target to attack. Sharks treated under mid and high CO₂ conditions also reduced their attack behavior.

“They significantly reduced their bumps and bites on the bricks compared to the control group,” Dixson said. “It’s like they’re uninterested in their food.”

Exposure to carbon dioxide did not significantly affect the sharks’ overall activity levels. The gill rate of the sharks – an indicator of heart rate – held in different water conditions was not significantly different, suggesting that differences in stress to the sharks was not likely affecting the experimental results.

Dixson noted that the study was carried out under laboratory conditions and thus does not allow for the full evaluation of the potential effects of ocean acidification on predatory abilities of the smooth dogfish.

Live food was not used as the odor cue because sharks can detect prey with their other senses, such as hearing and their ability to detect electrical impulses. By using an odor cue, the researchers were focusing on only the chemical sensing of sharks. Dixson’s future work will explore how sharks’ other senses might be affected by ocean acidification.

Sharks are an ancient species, and in the past have adapted to ocean acidification conditions projected for the future. But they’ve never had to adapt to changes happening as quickly as they are today.

“It’s the rate of change that’s happening that’s concerning. Sharks have never had to deal with it this fast,” Dixson said.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award number NSF-IOS-0843440. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agency.

CITATION: Danielle L. Dixson, et al., “Odor tracking in sharks is reduced under future ocean acidification conditions.” (Global Change Biology, August 2014) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12678/full

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The clotting particles, which are based on soft and deformable hydrogel materials, are triggered by the same factor that initiates the body’s own clotting processes. Testing done in animal models and in a simulated circulatory system suggest that the particles are effective at slowing bleeding and can safely circulate in the bloodstream. The particles have been tested with human blood, but have not undergone clinical trials in humans.

Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the American Heart Association, the research was reported September 7, 2014, in the journal Nature Materials. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Arizona State University collaborated on the research.

“When used by emergency medical technicians in the civilian world or by medics in the military, we expect this technology could reduce the number of deaths from excessive bleeding,” said Ashley Brown, a research scientist in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and first author of the paper. “If EMTs and medics had particles like these that could be injected and then go specifically to the site of a serious injury, they could help decrease the number of deaths associated with serious injuries.”

The bloodstream contains proteins known as fibrinogen that are the precursors for fibrin, the polymer that provides the basic structure for natural blood clots. When they receive the right signals from a protein known as thrombin, these precursors polymerize at the site of the bleeding. The synthetic platelet-like particles use the same trigger, and so are activated only when the body’s natural clotting process is initiated.

To create that trigger, the researchers followed a process known as molecular evolution to develop an antibody that could be attached to the hydrogel particles to change their form when they encounter thrombin-activated fibrin. The resulting antibody has a high affinity for the polymerized form of fibrin and a low affinity for the precursor material.

“Fibrin production is on the back end of the clotting process, so we feel that it is a safer place to try to interact with it,” said Tom Barker, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and one of the paper’s co-corresponding authors. “The specificity of this material provides a very important advantage in triggering clotting at just the right time.”

The effectiveness of the platelet-like particles has been tested in an animal model and in a microfluidic chamber designed to simulate conditions within the body’s circulatory system. In the chamber, tubes about the thickness of a human hair were lined with endothelial cells as in natural blood vessels.

The chamber was used to study normal human blood, as well as human blood that had been depleted of its natural platelets. In platelet-rich blood, clots formed as expected, and blood without platelets did not form clots. When the platelet-like particles were added to the platelet-depleted blood, it was able to clot.

The researchers also tested blood from infants that had undergone open heart surgery, which requires that their blood be diluted, reducing its clotting ability. When platelet-like particles were added to the dilute neonate blood, it was able to form clots.

Finally, safety testing was done on blood from hemophiliac patients. Because that blood lacks the triggers needed to cause fibrin formation, the particles had no effect.

Before they can be used in humans, the particles will have to undergo human trials and receive clearance from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

About one micron in diameter, the particles were originally developed to be used on the battlefield by wounded soldiers, who might self-administer them using a device about the size of a smartphone. But the researchers believe the particles could also reduce the need for platelet transfusions in patients undergoing chemotherapy or bypass surgery, and in those with certain blood disorders.

“For a patient with insufficient platelets due to bleeding or an inherited disorder, physicians often have to resort to platelet transfusions, which can be difficult to obtain,” said Dr. Wilbur Lam, another of the paper’s co-authors and a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine. “These particles could potentially be a way to obviate the need for a transfusion. Though they don’t have all the assets of natural platelets, a number of intriguing experiments have shown that the particles help augment the clotting process.”

In addition to providing new treatment options, the particles could also cut costs by reducing costly natural transfusions, said Lam, who is also an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

What ultimately happens to the hydrogel particles circulating in the bloodstream will be the topic of future research, noted Brown. Particles of similar size and composition are normally eliminated from the body.

While the platelet-like particles lack many features of natural platelets, the researchers were surprised to find one property in common. Clots formed by natural platelets begin to contract over a period of hours, starting the body’s repair process. Clots formed from the synthetic particles also contract, but over a longer period of time, Brown noted.

In addition to those already mentioned, co-authors of the paper included Andrew Lyon, co-corresponding author and dean of the College of Science and Technology at Chapman University; Sarah Stabenfeldt, co-first author and now an assistant professor at Arizona State University; Byungwook Ahn, Riley Hannan and Victoria Stefanelli, from the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Kabir Dhada and Emily Herman from the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Dr. Nina Guzzetta from the Division of Pediatric Cardiology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University School of Medicine; and Alexander Alexeev from the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

CITATION: Ashley Brown, et al., “Ultrasoft microgels displaying emergent platelet-like behaviours,” Nature Materials, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat4066

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under awards HHSN268201000043C, R21EB013743 and R01EB011566; the John and Mary Brock Discovery Research Fund; the Department of Defense under award W81XWH1110306, and an American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship. The opinions expressed in this news release are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the sponsoring agencies.

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The study helps explain the genetic basis for the incredible diversity among cichlid fishes and provides new information about vertebrate evolution. The genomic information from the study will help answer questions about human biology and disease.

"Our study reveals a spectrum of methods that nature uses to allow organisms to adapt to different environments,” said co-senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, scientific director of vertebrate genome biology at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a biomedical and genomic research center. “These mechanisms are likely also at work in humans and other vertebrates, and by focusing on the remarkably diverse cichlid fishes, we were able to study this process on a broad scale for the first time.”

The new study was published in the September 3 advance online edition of the journal Nature. The work was a collaboration between the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Eawag Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Sciences, in addition to more than 70 scientists from the international cichlid research community.

African cichlid fishes are some of the most diverse organisms on the planet, with over 2,000 known species. Some lakes are home to hundreds of distinct species that evolved from a common ancestral species in the Nile River. Like Darwin’s finches, the cichlids are a dramatic example of adaptive radiation, the process by which multiple species radiate from an ancestral species through adaptation.

In the new study, the researchers sequenced the genomes and transcriptomes – the protein-coding RNA - from ten tissues of five distinct lineages of African cichlids. The sequenced species include the Nile tilapia, representing the ancestral lineage, and four East African species: a species that inhabits a river near Lake Tanganyika; a species from Lake Tanganyika colonized 10-20 million years ago; a cichlid species from Lake Malawi colonized 5 million years ago; and species from Lake Victoria where the fish radiated only 15,000 to 100,000 years ago.

The researchers found a number of genomic changes at play in the adaptive radiation. Compared to the ancestral lineage, the East African cichlid genomes possess an excess of gene duplications, alterations in regulatory elements in the genome, accelerated evolution of protein-coding elements in genes for pigmentation, and other distinct features that affect gene expression.

“It’s not one big change in the genome of this fish, but lots of different molecular mechanisms used to achieve this amazing adaptation and speciation,” said Federica Di Palma, co-senior author of the Nature study and director of science in vertebrate and health genomics at The Genome Analysis Center in the UK.

Some changes in the genome appear to have accumulated before the species left the rivers to colonize lakes and radiated into hundreds of species. This suggests that the cichlids were once in a period of reduced constraint. During this time, the fishes accumulated diversity through genetic mutations, and the relaxed constraint – in which all individuals thrived, not just the fittest – allowed genetic variation to accumulate. As the fish later inhabited new environmental niches within the lakes, new species could form quickly through selection. In this way, a reservoir of mutations – and resultant phenotypes – represented a genomic toolkit that allowed quick adaptation.

More work remains to fully dissect the mutations that cause each of the varying phenotypes in cichlid fish, which could help explain how similar forms or traits evolved in parallel in different lakes.

"By learning how natural populations, such as fishes, adapt and evolve under selective pressures, we can learn how these pressures affect humans in terms of health and disease,” Di Palma said.

Todd Streelman, professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and a co-author of the study, studies Lake Malawi cichlid species to address biological questions that are difficult to study in traditional model organisms.

"These fishes provide a great way to identify the genes that control traits in natural populations," Streelman said. “Now that we understand the genome sequences of some of these species, it’s a lot easier to interpret all of the new genetic and genomic data we collect in the lab.”

His lab studies natural mechanisms of lifelong tooth replacement and the genomics of complex social behavior using closely-related Malawi cichlids. The new genome sequence of the Lake Malawi cichlid will allow Streelman’s lab to investigate which genes are turned on or off during these processes.

Streelman's research group cultures roughly 25 different Malawi cichlid species in aquatic facilities at Georgia Tech, through research funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).

This work was funded in part by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the Swiss National Science Foundation, the German Science Foundation, Biomedical Research Council of A*STAR, Singapore, the European Research Council, US National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), and the Wellcome Trust.

 CITATION: David Brawand, et al."The genomic substrate for adaptive radiation in African cichlid fish." (Nature, September 2014) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13726   

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 Writer: Leah Eisenstadt, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

Earlier research had shown that synthetic RNA oligonucleotides introduced into cells could help repair DNA breaks, but the new study is believed to be the first to show that a cell’s own RNA could be used for DNA recombination and repair. The finding provides a better understanding of how cells maintain genomic stability, and if the phenomenon extends to human cells, could potentially lead to new therapeutic or prevention strategies for genetic-based disease.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Georgia Research Alliance. The results were reported September 3, 2014, in the journal Nature.

“We have found that genetic information can flow from RNA to DNA in a homology-driven manner, from cellular RNA to a homologous DNA sequence,” said Francesca Storici, an associate professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and senior author of the paper. “This process is moving the genetic information in the opposite direction from which it normally flows. We have shown that when an endogenous RNA molecule can anneal to broken homologous DNA without being removed, the RNA can repair the damaged DNA. This finding reveals the existence of a novel mechanism of genetic recombination.”

Most newly-transcribed RNA is quickly exported from the nucleus to the cytoplasm of cells to perform its many essential roles in gene coding and expression, and in regulation of cell operations. Generally, RNA is kept away from – or removed from – nuclear DNA. In fact, it is known that annealing of RNA with complementary chromosomal DNA is dangerous for cells because it may impair transcription elongation and DNA replication, promoting genome instability.

This new study reveals that under conditions of genotoxic stress, such as a break in DNA, the role of RNA paired with complementary DNA may be different, and beneficial, for a cell. “We discovered a mechanism in which transcript RNA anneals with complementary broken DNA and serves as a template for recombination and DNA repair, and thus has a role in both modifying and stabilizing the genome,” Storici explained.

DNA damage can arise from a variety of causes both inside and outside the cell. Because the DNA consists of two complementary strands, one strand can normally be used to repair damage to the other. However, if the cell sustains breakage in both strands – known as a double-strand break – the repair options are more limited. Simply rejoining the broken ends carries a high risk of unwanted mutations or chromosome rearrangement, which can cause undesirable effects including cancer. Without successful repair, however, the cell may die or be unable to carry out important functions.

Beginning in 2007, Storici’s research team showed that synthetic RNA introduced into cells – including human cells – could repair DNA damage, but the process was inefficient and there were questions about whether the process could occur naturally.

To find out whether cells could use endogenous RNA transcripts to repair DNA damage, she and graduate students Havva Keskin and Ying Shen – who are first and second authors on the paper – devised experiments using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is widely used in the lab for genetics and genome engineering. The researchers developed a strategy for distinguishing repair by endogenous RNA from repair by the normal DNA-based mechanisms in the budding yeast cells, including using mutants that lacked the ability to convert the RNA into a DNA copy. They then induced a DNA double-strand break in the yeast genome and observed whether the organism could survive and grow by repairing the damage using only transcript RNA within the cells.

The DNA region that generates the transcript was constructed to contain a marker gene interrupted by an intron, which is a sequence that is removed only from the RNA during the process of transcription, explained Keskin. Following intron removal, the transcript RNA sequence has no intron, while the DNA region that generates the transcript retains the intron; thus they are distinguishable. Only the repair templated by the transcript devoid of the intron can restore the function of a homologous marker gene in which the DNA double-strand break is induced, she added.

The researchers measured success by counting the number of yeast colonies growing on a Petri dish, indicating that the repair had been made by endogenous RNA. Testing was done on two types of breaks, one in the DNA from which the RNA transcript had been made, and the other in a homologous sequence from a different location in the DNA.

The research team, which also included scientists from Drexel University, found that proximity of the RNA to the broken DNA increased the efficiency of the repair and that the repair occurred via a homologous recombination process. Storici believes that the repair mechanism may operate in cells beyond yeast, and that many types of RNA can be used.

“We are showing that the flow of genetic information from RNA to DNA is not restricted to retro-elements and telomeres, but occurs with a generic cellular transcript, making it more of a general phenomenon than had been anticipated,” she explained. “Potentially, any RNA in the cell could have this function.”

For the future, Storici hopes to learn more about the mechanism, including what regulates it. She also wants to learn whether it takes place in human cells. If so, that could have implications for treating or preventing diseases that are caused by genetic damage.

“Cells synthesize lots of RNA transcripts during their life spans; therefore, RNA may have an unanticipated impact on genomic stability and plasticity,” said Storici, who is also a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Cancer Scientist. “We need to understand in which situations cells would activate RNA-DNA recombination. Better understanding this molecular process could also help us manipulate mechanisms for therapy, allowing us to treat a disease or prevent it altogether.”

In addition to Storici, the paper’s authors include Alexander Mazin, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Drexel University; postdoctoral fellow Fei Huang and graduate student Mikir Patel, also from Drexel; Havva Keskin, a Georgia Tech graduate student; Ying Shen, a Ph.D. graduate from Georgia Tech who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University School of Medicine; and graduate student Taehwan Yang and undergraduate student Katie Ashley from School of Biology at Georgia Tech.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award number MCB-1021763, by the National Institutes of Health under award numbers CA100839 and P30CA056036, and by the Georgia Research Alliance under award number R9028. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: Havva Keskin, et al., “Transcript-RNA-templated DNA recombination and repair,” Nature 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13682

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Damaged coral reefs emit chemical cues that repulse young coral and fish, discouraging them from settling in the degraded habitat, according to new research. The study shows for the first time that coral larvae can smell the difference between healthy and damaged reefs when they decide where to settle.

Coral reefs are declining around the world. Overfishing is one cause of coral collapse, depleting the herbivorous fish that remove the seaweed that sprouts in damaged reefs. Once seaweed takes hold of a reef, a tipping point can occur where coral growth is choked and new corals rarely settle.

The new study shows how chemical signals from seaweed repel young coral from settling in a seaweed-dominated area. Young fish were also not attracted to the smell of water from damaged reefs. The findings suggest that designating overfished coral reefs as marine protected areas may not be enough to help these reefs recover because chemical signals continue to drive away new fish and coral long after overfishing has stopped.

“If you’re setting up a marine protected area to seed recruitment into a degraded habitat, that recruitment may not happen if young fish and coral are not recognizing the degraded area as habitat,” said Danielle Dixson, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and the study's first author.

The study will be published August 22 in the journal Science. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Teasley Endowment to Georgia Tech.

The new study examined three marine areas in Fiji that had adjacent fished areas. The country has established no-fishing areas to protect its healthy habitats and also to allow damaged reefs to recover over time.

Juveniles of both corals and fishes were repelled by chemical cues from overfished, seaweed-dominated reefs but attracted to cues from coral-dominated areas where fishing is prohibited. Both coral and fish larvae preferred certain chemical cues from species of coral that are indicators of a healthy habitat, and they both avoided certain seaweeds that are indicators of a degraded habitat.

The study for the first time tested coral larvae in a method that has been used previously to test fish, and found that young coral have strong preferences for odors from healthy reefs.

"Not only are coral smelling good areas versus bad areas, but they’re nuanced about it," said Mark Hay, a professor in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and the study's senior author. "They’re making careful decisions and can say, 'settle or don’t settle.'"

The study showed that young fish have an overwhelming preference for water from healthy reefs. The researchers put water from healthy and degraded habitats into a flume that allowed fish to choose to swim in one stream of water or the other. The researchers tested the preferences of 20 fish each from 15 different species and found that regardless of species, family or trophic group, each of the 15 species showed up to an eight times greater preference for water from healthy areas.

The researchers then tested coral larvae from three different species and found that they preferred water from the healthy habitat five-to-one over water from the degraded habitat.

Chemical cues from corals also swayed the fishes' preferences, the study found. The researchers soaked different corals in water and studied the behavior of fish in that water, which had picked up chemical cues from the corals. Cues of the common coral Acropora nasuta enhanced attraction to water from the degraded habitat by up to three times more for all 15 fishes tested. A similar preference was found among coral larvae.

Acropora corals easily bleach, are strongly affected by algal competition, and are prone to other stresses. The data demonstrate that chemical cues from these corals are attractive to fish and corals because they are found primarily in healthy habitats. Chemical cues from hardy corals, which can grow even in overfished habitats, were less attractive to juvenile fishes or corals.

The researchers also soaked seaweed in water and tested fish and coral preferences in that water. Cues from the common seaweed Sargassum polycystum, which can bloom and take over a coral reef, reduced the attractiveness of water to fish by up to 86 percent compared to water without the seaweed chemical cues. Chemical cues from the seaweed decreased coral larval attraction by 81 percent.

"Corals avoided that smell more than even algae that's chemically toxic to coral but doesn't bloom," Dixson said.

Future work will involve removing plots of seaweed from damaged reefs and studying how that impacts reef recovery.

A minimum amount of intervention at the right time and the right place could jump start the recovery of overfished reefs, Hay said. That could bring fish back to the area so they settle and eat the seaweed around the corals. The corals would then get bigger because the seaweed is not overgrown. Bigger corals would then be more attractive to more fish.

"What this means is we probably need to manage these reefs in ways that help remove the most negative seaweeds and then help promote the most positive corals," Hay said.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), under award number OCE-0929119, and the National Institutes of Health, under award number U01-TW007401. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agency.

CITATION: Dixson et al., "Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting corals and fishes: A tipping
point that may limit reef recovery." (August 2014, Science). http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/892 

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Scientific Contacts:

Mark Hay
mark.hay@biology.gatech.edu
Fiji phone numbers: 679-833-3300 or 679-979-5991 (cell). 679-653-0093 (landline)
Skype: Markhaygt

Danielle Dixson
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Belize phone: 011-501-532-2392
Skype: Danielle.Dixson

Writer: Brett Israel

This could be the one, the project that Philip Santangelo will be talking about when he’s 80 and retired and rocking on the front porch, in some distant future – a promising future for mankind because, well, this could be the one.

Santangelo, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is helping lead a research team that was recently awarded a $5.5 million grant from the NIH/NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) for their role in a national, multi-pronged effort to once and for all cure HIV/AIDS.

“This is like the Holy Grail for a molecular imaging person who’s interested in infectious disease. From my point of view, this is it, this is huge,” says Santangelo, who is partnering with Emory’s Francois Villinger as principal investigators on the research, supported by the aforementioned R01 (which is the original and historically oldest grant mechanism used by the National Institutes of Health, or NIH).

The prospect of eliminating HIV from infected patients may be achievable with novel anti-retroviral therapies, but it would require new tools with greater sensitivity than what is now available. So the research aims to create and improve imaging technology, to better monitor HIV reservoirs.

“This was an RFA [Request for Application]. It was a response to an RFA regarding delivering therapeutics to active viral reservoirs,” Santangelo explains. “At NIH right now, especially at NIAID, they have a huge emphasis on trying to cure HIV.”

But here’s the dilemma Santangelo, et al, are looking at: A person who’s infected with the HIV virus is treated with anti-retroviral therapies. It appears to work. Within a month, the virus is undetectable in the blood stream. It’s been suppressed. But if you take the patient off the therapy, the virus comes back. It rebounds. “The drugs work but they are not sufficient to clear the virus. And really, we don’t know why that is yet,” Santangelo says. “Where is the virus? Where are the active reservoirs during suppression?”

The prospect of eliminating HIV from infected patients may be close at hand, but such a lofty goal will require new tools with greater sensitivity than currently available to monitor the progress of novel anti-retroviral therapies – not only in blood but also in organs that harbor such reservoirs and sites of residual viral replication in vivo.

“We’re not necessarily in this project, quote, 'creating the cure.' But we’re creating a tool that’s going to give us a lot more information about how you might go about doing that,” Santangelo says. “Otherwise, it’s a shot in the dark, you’re just trying different approaches. It’s trial and error. In the drug development world, trial and error is useful, but not ideal, and certainly not efficient.”

This research and resulting improvements in imaging technology, he says, will eventually give drug developers more information than they’ve had before, about how drugs are affecting very specific parts of the body.

“It’s about giving them much more powerful information about what’s happening, as opposed to downstream information,” says Santangelo, whose research areas include molecular imaging, nano-biophotonics, and optical microscopy. The long-term aim is to cure HIV, he adds, “and we’re working on a tool to help facilitate that.”

And that, he adds, is the reason the research got its funding – the NIH wants this tool in its toolbox. The grant covers five years, but it’s been a seven-year journey to this point. It began with a discussion between Santangelo and Emory professor Eric Hunter, whose research is focused on the molecular biology of HIV and other retroviruses.

“We were sitting around a table and Eric basically said, ‘one thing we’d like to know is, where is the virus? Is there a way to image this?’ I said, ‘I have no idea, but let’s see if we can figure that out.’ So I went back to the drawing board and thought about ways to approach the problem,” Santangelo says. “But that’s how it started – a group of people sitting around the table, asking, ‘how do we address this?’ and me being crazy enough to say, ‘I’ll try this,’ because I don’t say no to anything.”

Hunter introduced Santangelo to researcher/pathologist Villinger. They went after and received a $30,000 boost from the Woodruff Foundation, then got $100,000 from the Georgia Research Alliance, “and these were so important in pushing the momentum forward,” Santangelo says.

Then they received $450,000 from the NIH in the form of an Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award (R21) and now, $5.5 million, to support the work of an all-star team of researchers, including (among others) principal investigators Santangelo and Villinger, as well as Ray Schinazi, who directs the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology at Emory, and is a co-investigator.

The overall goal, according to Santangelo, is to create or improve an imaging tool that will determine how the virus is being affected by a new drug strategy, and also to help promote new drugs that Schinazi is working on – “to clear HIV, and also to make current drugs more effective,” says Santangelo, who believes that by enhancing current imaging technology, particularly CT (computed tomography, or CAT scanning) and PET (positron emission tomography), he can track the reservoirs, including active viral reservoirs.

“If you can figure out where the reservoirs are, if you can figure out how long they are being affected by the drugs, and how the drugs are actually changing the reservoirs, we might be able to clear them,” says Santangelo, whose eyes light up at the prospect, giving him the look of a kid contemplating a super toy that hasn’t been invented yet. “And if you can clear these reservoirs, you could cure AIDS, and if you can cure AIDS, well, that would be pretty awesome.”

BMES, a professional organization for biomedical engineering founded in 1968, has about 6,500 members dedicated to human health and well-being. The election of Zhu and Jo brings the number of BMES Fellows currently based at Georgia Tech to seven, all of them connected with the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and/or the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (a collaborative effort with Emory). The other previously named Fellows who are part of the current the Tech/Emory team are are Ravi Bellamkonda, Larry McIntire, Bob Nerem, Krish Roy and Ajit Yoganathan.

In addition to his scholarly contributions as a researcher, Jo’s role in leadership positions played a role in his election.

“Hanjoong is a true international leader in applying engineering to vascular biology,” Nerem says. “The other thing is, his great service to BMES. For example, he was overall conference chair for the 2012 national BMES meeting here in Atlanta.”

Nomination criteria also include a record of exceptional achievement and accomplishment, and Zhu certainly has that.

“Cheng is one of just a few who have been able to really perform significant experiments on the single cell and how a single cell responds to mechanical forces,” says Nerem, who recruited Zhu to Tech in 1990.

McIntire, who nominated Zhu, says, “The series of papers from Cheng’s group over the last 10 to 12 years is truly groundbreaking and combines the best in detailed engineering measurements and computational modeling with the best in modern cell and molecular biology.”

Apparently, the BMES agreed.

“The significance of it is still sinking in,” says Zhu. “I’m humbled by this great honor.”

This year, ACS named 99 members as fellows, chosen based on their outstanding accomplishments in chemistry as well as their contributions to ACS.

“It is a wonderful thing to be recognized by my peers and the research community,” said Xia.

Xia specializes in creating nanomaterials, studying their properties and exploring how they can be used. He has also served as an associate editor of the ACS journal Nano Letters since 2012.

Currently Xia is working on developing more efficient catalysts for hydrogen fuel cell technology, creating new scaffolding materials to be used in regenerative medicine, and cultivating contrasts and therapeutic agents for use in the fight against cancer.

“The scientists selected as this year’s class of ACS fellows are truly a dedicated group, said Tom Barton, president of ACS. “Their outstanding contributions to advancing chemistry through service to the society are many. In their quest to improve people’s lives through the transforming power of chemistry, they are helping us to fulfill the vision of the American Chemical Society.”

The new fellows will be recognized at the ACS Fellows Ceremony and Reception on Monday, August 11, 2014 during the society’s 248th National Meeting & Exposition in San Francisco.

This study was supported in part by NIH Grants 1R01DE019935-01, 1R01AR056445-01A2 and R01GM067958, and 1DP2OD007433-01 and NSF Grant NSF#0933643.

On June 27, high school students and teachers from the Georgia Intern Fellowships for Teachers (GIFT) program gathered in the courtyard outside Georgia Tech’s Instructional Center for a 20-minute hands-on exercise called “Group Intelligence.”

Martha Grover, a faculty member in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, serves as a science advisor for “Group Intelligence,” which was developed by Out of Hand Theater and is supported by funds from the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“Our goal is to suggest analogies between groups of molecules and groups of people,” Grover said. “The participants experience the assembly and draw their own conclusions.”

She and Ariel Fristoe, co-artistic director of Out of Hand Theater, observed as the group followed the instructions given by a woman’s voice on the recording:

Organize yourselves by eye color. Run in haphazard directions until you all start to run in the same pattern. Sing whatever song comes to mind and mingle until everyone is singing the same song (this group ended up with “The Wheels on the Bus”). Form two lines and pass erasers down the lines without dropping them or moving your feet.

Behind the activities are lessons about the importance of diversity, collaboration, leadership and competition in molecular formations and the development and functioning of living things.

Lindsay Whiteman, a chemistry and biology teacher at Sprayberry High School in Marietta and a GIFT recipient, was participating in a “Group Intelligence” for the first time and gauging whether it would be an effective tool for her classrooms this fall.

“The ‘Group Intelligence’ activity seemed like a great way for students to understand conceptually how molecules behave when they cannot see or fathom what is going on at the molecular level,” Whiteman said. “High school students struggle with abstract thought and spatial understanding, so this forces them to see how the molecules assemble and understand that they are working toward a common goal and that these natural forces create this act of group intelligence.

“The students really seemed to enjoy the activity itself and made many connections during our group discussion afterward about what each step represented. I will definitely be using this in my class.”

For more information about the activity or to order it for a classroom experience, click here.

Photo captions:

PHOTO 1: Participants in “Group Intelligence” self-assemble into groups of three to form equilateral triangles.

PHOTO 2: Martha Grover (left), ChBE professor and part of the Center for Chemical Evolution, and Ariel Fristoe, co-artistic director at Out of Hand Theater, watch the “Group Intelligence” activity under way.

PHOTO 3: Participants form a human DNA chain.

PHOTO 4: “Group Intelligence” participants get into the competitive spirit of the eraser-passing activity.

PHOTO 5: Group members march and clap after converting cacophony into a unison rendition of “The Wheels on the Bus.”

With RFE, however, patients get a mental boost. They are asked to think about moving. At the same time, a practitioner flexes the wrist. The goal is to send a long latency response from the stretch that arrives in the brain at the exact time the thought happens, creating a neural signal. The result is a strong, combined response that zips back to the forearm muscles and moves the wrist.

It all happens in a span of approximately 40 to 60 milliseconds.

“Timing is everything. When the window is that small, it’s not easy for two people to match each other,” said Georgia Institute of Technology master’s graduate Lauren Lacey.

That’s why Lacey and a team of fellow Georgia Tech researchers created a mechanical device that takes people out of the process, replacing them with accurate computers. Their functional MRI-compatible hemiparesis rehab device creates a long latency stretch reflex at the exact time as a brain signal.

“It’s kind of like trying to fill a bucket with water,” explained Minoru Shinohara, an associate professor in the School of Applied Physiology and director of the Human Neuromuscular Physiology Lab. “Stroke individuals can only mentally fill it halfway. The machine pours in the rest to make it full.”

So far, the research team has worked only with healthy individuals in their study. Study participants lie on a bed with the arm extended beneath a pneumatic actuator tendon hammer. In order to simulate the weak signal created by hemiparesis individuals to move their wrist, a transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS) is placed on the heads of these healthy individuals at a 45-degree angle. Milliseconds after the hammer taps the wrist’s tendon, the TMS creates a weak signal in the motor cortex. The responses overlap, produce and send a strong signal back to the arm, and the wrist moves.

The team has successfully varied the timing of the TMS signal and speed of the hammer to strike faster or slower depending on how much of a boost is needed to complement the brain signal. Now that the researchers have proven the viability of the TMS-actuator system, they will next work with stroke individuals.

“The device is designed to adapt to people whether they are hyper, normo or hyporeflexive,” said Lacey, who graduated in spring with a master’s degree from the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Also, because the machine is MRI-compatible, it will allow the team to study what is happening in the brain during rehab, opening the door for robotics.

“Once we fully understand what is happening mentally and physiologically, we should be able to create a robot that can reproduce successful rehabilitative exercises such as RFE,” said Jun Ueda, an associate professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering. “It appears that the timing is the critical piece of this exercise. Robots are great at timing, so the results are very promising for robotics.”

The Georgia Tech team was assisted by researchers at Japan’s Kagoshima University, Kazumi Kawahira, Megumi Shimodozono and Yong Yu, who originally performed clinical studies of conventional RFE. The device was presented at the Design of Medical Devices Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota this spring.

This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under sub-award EEC 0540834. Any conclusions expressed are those of the principal investigator and may not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

Many processes across the life, physical, and social sciences are thought of as dynamic complex systems, where sophisticated and unpredictable behavior arises from interactions between connected components. Despite the apparent complexity, these systems often have a hidden underlying structure that can provide a much simpler description for their behavior if it is accurately captured.

Rozell and his research team are developing fundamental mathematical analyses and algorithms for using complex systems data to learn about basic building blocks for this structure in a given system and to track how this structure changes in time. While there are many potential applications of this work, Rozell and his group currently focus on neuroscience, with an emphasis on how information is represented in sensory and motor neural systems. They also study social networks and collaborative filtering, with an emphasis on personalized learning, and they examine interactions in the physical world, with an emphasis on the physics of both solid body and fluid motion.

An associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2008, Rozell is the second faculty member from ECE and the fourth faculty member from Georgia Tech to receive this honor. Past recipients include Robert J. Butera (ECE, 2000), Joshua S. Weitz (School of Biology, 2008), and Martha A. Grover (School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 2011).

This is one of nature’s great laboratories. Yen and her team of scientists are conducting experiments here that are possible nowhere else. Outfitted in red parkas, they are not here to drill into frozen lakes or fly over thinning ice sheets. They spend what little daylight they have searching for tiny organisms in the frigid waters.

The scientists climb aboard the R/V Lawrence M Gould, a massive research vessel operated by the National Science Foundation (NSF). They cruise past giant icebergs and through rafts of loose ice to Palmer Deep, a location where the water is 2,000 feet (600 meters) deep. From the huge stern A-frame of the ship, they lower plankton nets into the zero-degree Celsius water and haul live animals aboard. In Antarctica, zero degrees Celsius is a pleasant day, but the recent bout of 80-knot wind gusts tells them the austral winter is on its way.

“The weather has been good,” Yen said. “We’ve gone out and have been collecting plankton all around.”

Yen, a professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, is on her second polar plunge. She’s an ecologist with an engineer’s eye. Her team of biologists and engineers haul each day’s catch back to the lab at Palmer Station, which provides no escape from the cold. There, the scientists study plankton swimming motion with video cameras in a room kept at zero degrees Celsius, to mimic the animals’ natural environment.

Plankton are the base of the food chain, but their environment is changing. Around the southern continent, the water temperature is stable at around zero degrees Celsius because of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, easily dissolves in the cold water, acidifying the ocean. The acidifying oceans might be triggering a destructive chain of events underwater that could harm the food web around the world.

That’s why Yen and her team have come here, in search of a tiny organism that could be a canary in the coal mine of climate change.

Read the full story.

A new Georgia Institute of Technology study investigated how quickly 32 animals urinate. It turns out that it’s all about the same. Even though an elephant’s bladder is 3,600 times larger than a cat’s (18 liters vs. 5 milliliters), both animals relieve themselves in about 20 seconds. In fact, all animals that weigh more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) urinate in that same time span.

“It’s possible because larger animals have longer urethras,” said David Hu, the Georgia Tech assistant professor who led the study. “The weight of the fluid in the urethra is pushing the fluid out. And because the urethra is long, flow rate is increased.”

For example, an elephant’s urethra is one meter in length. The pressure of fluid in it is the same at the bottom of a swimming pool three feet deep. An elephant urinates four meters per second, or the same volume per second as five showerheads.

“If its urethra were shorter, the elephant would urinate for a longer time and be more susceptible to predators,” Hu explained.

The findings conflict with studies that indicate urinary flow is controlled on bladder pressure generated by muscular contraction. The study has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Hu (George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Biology) and graduate student Patricia Yang noticed that gravity allows larger animals to empty their bladders in jets or sheets of urine. Gravity’s effect on small animals is minimal.

“They urinate in small drops because of high viscous and capillary forces. It’s like peeing in space,” said Yang, who is pursuing her doctoral degree in the School of Mechanical Engineering. “Mice and rats go in less than two seconds. Bats are done in a fraction of a second.”

The research team went to a zoo to watch 16 animals relieve themselves, then watched 28 YouTube videos. They saw cows, horses, dogs and more.

The more they watched, the more they realized their findings could help engineers.

“It turns out that you don’t need external pressure to get rid of fluids quickly,” said Hu. “Nature has designed a way to use gravity instead of wasting the animal’s energy.”

Hu envisions systems for water tanks, backpacks and fire hoses that can be built for more efficiency. As an example, he and his students have created a demonstration that empties a teacup, quart and gallon of water in the same duration using varying lengths of connected tubes. In a second experiment, the team fills three cups with the same amount of water, then watches them empty at differing rates. The longer the tube, the faster it empties.

“Nature has shown us that no matter how big the fire truck, water can still come out in the same time as a tiny truck,” Hu added.

The trick is gravity. Newton would be proud.

Around 4 billion years ago, the first molecules of life came together on the early Earth and formed precursors of modern proteins and RNA. Scientists studying the origin of life have been searching for clues about how these reactions happened. Some of those clues have been found in the ribosome.

The core of the ribosome is essentially the same in all living systems, while the outer regions expand and become complicated as species gain complexity. By digitally peeling back the layers of modern ribosomes in the new study, scientists were able to model the structures of primordial ribosomes.

“The history of the ribosome tells us about the origin of life,” said Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  “We have worked out on a fine level of detail how the ribosome originated and evolved.”

The study was sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution at Georgia Tech. The results were published June 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In biology, the genetic information stored in DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which is then shipped out of the cell nucleus. Ribosomes, in all species use mRNA as a blueprint for building all the proteins and enzymes essential to life. The ribosome’s job is called translation.

The common core of the ribosome is essentially the same in humans, yeast, bacteria and archaea – in all living systems. The Georgia Tech team has shown that as organisms evolve and become more complex, so do their ribosomes. Humans have the largest and most complex ribosomes. But the changes are on the surface – the heart of a human ribosome the same as in a bacterial ribosome.

“The translation system is the operating system of life,” Williams said. “At its core the ribosome is the same everywhere. The ribosome is universal biology.”

In the new study, Williams and Research Scientist Anton Petrov compared three-dimensional structures of ribosomes from a variety of species of varying biological complexity, including humans, yeast, bacteria and archaea. The researchers found distinct fingerprints in the ribosomes where new structures were added to the ribosomal surface without altering the pre-existing core.

Additions to the ribosome cause insertion fingerprints. Much like a botanist can carve back twigs and branches on a tree to learn about its growth and age, Petrov and Williams show how segments were continually added to the ribosome without changing the underlying structure.  The research team extrapolated the process backwards in time to generate models of simple, primordial ribosomes.

“We learned some of the rules of the ribosome, that evolution can change the ribosome as long as it does not mess with its core,” Williams said. “Evolution can add things on, but it can’t change what was already there.”

For a video on the origins and evolution of the ribosome, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei6qGLBTsKM

This research is supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute under award number NNA09DA78A. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agency.

CITATION: Anton S. Petrov, et al., “Evolution of the Ribosome at Atomic Resolution.” (June 2014, PNAS) http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1407205111

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Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (@btiatl) (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel 

Ribonucleotides (rNMPs), the units of RNA, are the most abundant non-canonical nucleotides found in genomic DNA. rNMPs, either not removed from Okazaki fragments during DNA replication or incorporated and scattered throughout the genome, pose a perturbation to the structure and a threat to the integrity of DNA. The instability of DNA is mainly due to the extra 2’-hydroxyl (OH) group of rNMPs which gives rise to local structural effects that may disturb various molecular interactions in cells. As a result of these structural perturbations by rNMPs, the elastic properties of DNA may also be affected.

DNA has unique mechanical properties that are crucial in many natural biochemical processes and play an important role in DNA-based nanotechnology applications. Despite demonstrations of their abundance and importance, no data exist in literature regarding elastic measurements and sequence-dependent structural distortions of DNA with isolated single rNMP intrusions. With the goal to bring insights on how rNMPs change elastic properties of DNA and its structure, the Georgia Tech team with Hsiang-Chih Chiu and Kyung Duk Koh, a postdoctoral fellow at the time in the lab of Elisa Riedo in the School of Physics, and a PhD candidate in the lab of Francesca Storici from the School of Biology, respectively, together with the graduate student Annie Lesiak from Angelo Bongiorno lab in the School of Physics and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and in collaboration with Markus Germann and his graduate student Marina Evich from the Department of Chemistry at Georgia State University, conducted an innovative, experimental and theoretical study utilizing two short DNA molecules containing isolated rNMP intrusions. Storici said: <<We examined and identified how the elasticity and structure of DNA are altered by the rNMP intrusions in the studied DNA sequences>>. AFM-based single molecule force spectroscopy demonstrated that rNMP intrusions in short DNA duplexes can decrease – by 32% – or slightly increase the stretch modulus of DNA depending on specific sequence contexts next to the rNMPs. In addition, MD simulations and NMR experiments indicated that rNMP inclusions locally change the torsional distortion of the sugar-phosphate backbone in DNA only when the rNMPs are in specific locations in the DNA sequence. Riedo concluded: <<Our work opens up the route to use AFM single molecules measurements to understand how defects and the base sequence can affect the elasticity of short DNA molecules>>.

The demonstrated ability of rNMPs to locally change DNA mechanical properties and structure may find applications in structural DNA nanotechnology and help understanding how such intrusions impact DNA biological functions. Overall, these findings open a new route for understanding how rNMPs may influence DNA structure, chemistry, and biology.

The study is just published as an article in the journal Nanoscale (accepted, 2014):

Chiu HC*, Koh KD*, Evich M, Lesiak AL, Germann MW, Bongiorno A, Riedo E, Storici F (2014)

RNA intrusions change DNA elastic properties and structure. Nanoscale, DOI: 10.1039/C4NR01794C; *equal contribution.

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2014/nr/c4nr01794c

This project was supported by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy (DE-FG02-06ER46293), the National Science Foundation (NSF)(CMMI-1100290 and DMR-0820382), the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and the NSF grant CHE-0946869, the Integrative Biosystems Institute grant IBSI-4, the Georgia Research Alliance grant R9028 and the NSF grant MCB-1021763.

In his old job, Solomon McBride rarely did anything more challenging than stick groceries in a bag. In his current job, he’s performing experiments in a well-equipped lab, researching the negative effects antiretroviral drugs can have on the cardiovascular systems of HIV patients.

So yeah, the 18-year-old McBride likes his current job way more than his last job. Except, it’s not exactly a job. It’s more like an educational opportunity. And soon, he’ll have to give it up, but that’s good thing, because better things await McBride, a second-year Project ENGAGES student who will start attending Brandeis University near Boston, this fall on a Posse Scholarship.

If you’ve spent any time at the Parker H. Petit Institute for Biotechnology and Bioscience, chances are good that you’ve seen McBride or his fellow students in Project ENGAGES, a high school education program created through the NSF Science and Technology Center on the Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS, a research center that is supported and resides in the Petit Institute).

Developed last year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in partnership with Coretta Scott King Young Women's Leadership Academy and B.E.S.T Academy, two minority-serving public high schools in the City of Atlanta, the program aims to serve “a community of children who did not see themselves as belonging or fitting in with a place like Georgia Tech,” according to Lakeita Servance, who oversees Project ENGAGES as the EBICS’ (and Petit Institute’s) education outreach manager. “We’re also introducing students to a broader field of science. Studying biology doesn’t mean that you can only be a doctor, so this program demonstrates that you can do a number of different things, that you have choices and options.”

And McBride, who recently graduated from the B.E.S.T. Academy, likes his expanded options. He’d been thinking along the lines of careers in film, or economics, but after more than a year studying and working in Manu Platt’s lab he says, “science is wide open. I always liked science, but doubted myself, so I was hesitant. But now I feel like research is definitely something I want to do, and the experience here has given me a foundation for the college experience. I understand the mindset it takes now.”

During the school year, students involved in Project ENGAGES who are on the biotechnology track (like McBride) commit to working 12 to 15 hours a week in a Georgia Tech bio lab (there is also now an engineering track, developed under the leadership of the Georgia Tech Research Institute). During the summer, it goes up to 40 hours a week. Students are paid $9 an hour for their time – time they otherwise would have spent bagging groceries or flipping burgers, probably. So there is a sense not only of working for a grade, but actually producing results in the lab, helping to make hands on discoveries. That’s what hooked McBride, who also appreciates the commitment of his mentors and lab partners (undergrads, PhD students, post-docs, etc.).

“We get a wage, so it’s a job that we take seriously,” McBride says. “I’m sure it’s not easy to have a bunch of high school students in your labs, but they’ve given us responsibilities, they treat us like adults. There’s a sense of importance to what we’re doing, and you have to get it right. You learn it. And you get the hands on experience, working with the equipment, doing the experiments. You see the cause and effect. You make the connections. It all comes together.”

McBride comes from a family that places a high value on a college education, so his academic pursuits are grounded, to some degree, close to the heart. He has three older sisters who have set an inspirational pace. One graduated from Howard University, another from Swarthmore, and another is going to art school in Chicago. So, McBride is carrying on a bit of the family tradition, and when he gets to Boston, he’ll be a much more confident version of himself. Part of that is the Project ENGAGES experience, but the deeper source comes from his time at the B.E.S.T. Academy.

“I started there in the sixth grade, the first class at the school,” he says. “If you asked me then, I’d have said, ‘get me out of here right now!’ But looking back, it was a great experience, partly due to the challenges a new school faces. You’re a startup, learning how to stand on your feet, and you face many problems, you know, like growing pains. You go through that and you get a sense of resilience that you’re going to need throughout life.”

He showed plenty of resilience through an extensive Posse Scholar recruitment process – about 1,200 students in the Atlanta region applied for the 61 scholarships that were ultimately awarded. The scholarships come from the 25-year-old Posse Foundation, a U.S. non-profit organization that identifies, recruits and trains students with academic and leadership potential.

The scholars are then organized in supportive, often multicultural teams (or, “posses” of 10 students) comprised of students from the same city, and Posse Foundation partner colleges and universities award four-year, full-tuition leadership scholarships. Then, for eight months before beginning their college careers, the Posse Scholars attend weekly pre-collegiate training meetings, getting to know the members of their posse, and generally preparing for the academic, social and personal challenges ahead.

Getting through the door involved three rounds of interviews. Before the first round, McBride asked Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute who co-founded Project ENGAGES with assistant professor Manu Platt last year, to write a letter of recommendation – students are asked to supply this, and typically it comes from one of their high school teachers. The first question McBride got from the first interviewer was, How in the world did get a letter from a Georgia Tech professor? The answer is, Project ENGAGES.

McBride has met with his posse weekly since finding out he won the scholarship in December. They’re all Atlanta kids and all are African-American, which is a first for Posse, which serves (and has offices in) nine U.S. cities, and strives for a diverse collection of scholars. Project ENGAGES also puts a premium on diversity, integrating its group of entirely African-American high school students with the wide-ranging cultural melting pot that is the Petit Institute. So, McBride was a little surprised when he first met his monochromatic posse.

“It was weird at first, but then you get to know your posse and you realize that diversity doesn’t just mean skin color,” McBride ways. “My posse is made up of people from entirely different backgrounds, people with completely different life experiences, whether from an economic or family standpoint or otherwise.”

He expects the lessons of integrative communities to continue at Brandeis, and he is open minded about the educational possibilities, which he believes, like science, are wide open. McBride isn’t sure yet what he’ll major in, but he’s certain it will be related to scientific research. In the short term, however, he knows exactly what he wants to be: the next John Ewing.

Ewing, an undergrad at Vanderbilt University, where he also stars on the cross-country team, has been working in Nerem’s lab the past four summers. So, Ewing’s summertime role has evolved with the infusion of high school students in Petit Institute labs. There were 10 students in the first Project ENGAGES biotech class last year, all of whom returned to 40-hour status this summer, plus 10 new students on the biotech track, who began the summer session with a boot camp, and have only recently moved into labs.

“Boot camp is a lot to get through, but once they get in the lab, they start putting it all together, and that’s my favorite part,” says Ewing, a rising senior at Vanderbilt who grew up in Atlanta and plans to go to medical school. “You see how they react once they are paired with their mentors, you see the change between that first day, when research mentors present their projects, to the last day, when the high school students present their projects. They’ve gone from not really knowing what’s going on to being able to present and own a piece of a research project. That’s a really cool transformation.”

It’s a transformation he’s had a guiding hand in. Ewing helps organize the students, gives talks on cell biology, helps the kids with their research presentations – an all-around utility player with a friendly ear for the high school kids who are really just a few years younger than he is. And as an Atlanta guy who comes home every year and brings something back to the Georgia Tech community, he’s set an example for McBride, who envisions coming back to the Petit Institute to fill a similar kind of mentor’s role.

“John has had a huge impact on the program, and on me,” says McBride. “Not just for the four weeks of boot camp, but through the summer. I’m not sure he realizes it, but the example he sets, his dedication and support, is something we all admire. So yeah, I do want to be the next John Ewing. That would be pretty cool.”

Despite the many famous animals that populate the annals of Georgia Tech lore—Sideways, Stumpy’s bear, the St. Bernards of Lambda Chi—for many years, the Institute rarely engaged with animals in an academic capacity. Even as recently as the late 1990s, every single research animal on Tech’s campus was contained in a single tank inside a lab in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The sum total: six goldfish.

In the ensuing years, Georgia Tech researchers have expanded their focus to more fully explore the intersection of engineering and the natural world. And as they have, one theme has emerged again and again: For as much as we still have to learn about animals, they may have even more to teach us about ourselves.

These days, animals are helping researchers to better understand not only animals themselves but also the wider world, including humankind’s place within it—our physiology, our brains, our interactions with our environments. Animals are inspiring Georgia Tech’s faculty and students to create advanced robots, medical technology and improved prosthetics, among other developments that will shape the future, both saving and improving human lives.

Often, these animals aren’t the types that you would expect to be saving people. Take the sidewinder rattlesnake.

It’s best known for lying in wait in sandy stretches of the Southwest, ready to strike any prey that comes within reach and inject it with venom.

But the sidewinder’s unique motion that carves an arcing trail through the desert is proving key to researchers who seek to build a robot capable of moving across sand.

That is but one of a growing number of animal-related projects taking place on campus. As these endeavors have increased, Georgia Tech has taken steps to manage and oversee such work.

All research involving animals is conducted under strict guidelines ensuring that as few animals as possible are used in research, and that those animals are treated humanely. Animals have given much to researchers, and so researchers do their part to give something back.

Here, we look at just a small sampling of the ways in which animals are helping Georgia Tech researchers transform the world.

INSPIRING ROBOTS

Biologically inspired robotics has developed into a major focus at the Institute, with multiple labs looking to the animal kingdom for inspiration. One challenge that has long vexed researchers is the ability to traverse across sand. It’s a tricky prospect, as sandy surfaces can take on the properties of a solid, a liquid and even a gas.

But while robots struggle with the surface, various animals are able to move across sand, including lizards, sea turtles and snakes. Now Tech roboticists are mining the creatures’ behavior for their evolutionarily perfected secrets.

Animals are inspiring Tech’s faculty and students to create advanced robots, medical technology and improved prosthetics, among other developments that will shape the future, both saving and improving human lives.

A robotics team led by Dan Goldman, an assistant [associate] professor in the School of Physics, and David Hu, an assistant [associate] professor of mechanical engineering, began performing comparative studies on how sea turtles and sandfish (which essentially swim on land) move over sand.

Then they turned to snakes.

One snake-based robot that came out of the lab—known as Scalybot—was effective on many surfaces, but it always got stuck in sand. Many real snakes struggle with sand, too.

They partnered with Joe Mendelson, curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta and an adjunct professor at Tech, to study a snake that’s at ease on sand: the sidewinder rattlesnake.

“They’re famous for their funky sideways locomotion through sand dunes,” Mendelson says.

Georgia Tech prohibits venomous snakes on campus, and Tech researchers themselves can’t handle poisonous animals. Mendelson’s position at Zoo Atlanta allowed him to collect sidewinders from Arizona and conduct the research at the zoo in “the world’s most expensive sandbox.” Tech’s researchers simply observed the results.

The team now has a firm understanding of how sidewinders handle sandy slopes, and they’re examining how the snakes navigate obstructions. While sidewinder-style robots have obvious uses—search-and-rescue missions, military operations, planetary exploration—research partners from Harvard University have suggested sending the robots into sand-filled tunnels in Egyptian ruins.

“A robot can’t go down a sand-choked tunnel underground—only a snake can do that,” Mendelson says. “So we need a sidewinding robot with a camera that can look around. Then [if something of value is down there] you can put in the effort to dig it out.”

The needs of robots extend far beyond traversing sand, and inspiration has come from some surprising places. Hu received a lot of attention in 2012 for publishing a study of the “wet-dog shake”—when dogs shake wildly to dry themselves.

The physics of the wet-dog shake are impressive—dogs can shake themselves 70 percent dry in just a fraction of a second. While the research might seem silly, it does have useful implications. Hu says the research could be used for improved drying technology or in robotics.

“In the future, self-cleaning and self-drying may arise as an important capability for cameras and other equipment subject to wet or dusty conditions,” he says.

IMPROVING HUMAN LIVES

The School of Applied Physiology is home to the Comparative Neuromechanics Lab, where humans, rats and other creatures run on instrumented treadmills. Meanwhile, researchers gather data on how animals move.

This comparative data reveals a wealth of information on how healthy animals move, and how their bodies compensate after an injury. The findings are critical to the development of new approaches to rehabilitation of human and animal patients.

This research could be a potential alternative to bone-grafting operations.
The lab’s director, associate professor Young-Hui Chang, says he’d wanted to study animal locomotion ever since growing up watching animals in National Geographic documentaries.

The lab’s data also is being used in Tech’s Center for Prosthetic and Orthotic Research and Education to design and test new prosthetics, which are changing the lives of humans with missing limbs.

In the biotech quad on campus, the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences is focused largely on studying disease and injury and developing innovative treatments. One recent study showed that delivering stem cells on a polymer scaffold to treat large areas of missing bone led to improved results compared to using a scaffold alone. This research—conducted on rats—could be a potential alternative to bone-grafting operations.

“Massive bone injuries are among the most challenging problems that orthopedic surgeons face, and they are commonly seen as a result of accidents as well as in soldiers returning from war,” says the study’s lead author, Robert Guldberg, a professor of mechanical engineering and the Institute’s executive director. “This study shows that there is promise in treating these injuries by delivering stem cells to the injury site. These are injuries that would not heal without significant medical intervention.”

HELPING ANIMALS

Some researchers on campus have dedicated their time to developing models of animals. One team including researchers from applied physiology and biomedical engineering has developed a 3-D computer model that can be studied at almost the same level of detail as a physical specimen.

While the model can’t entirely replace live animals in experiments, it can greatly reduce the numbers that are used. The principal author of the model, Nathan Bunderson, also is in the process of making the model commercially available for educational purposes.

Another modeling effort that is providing a greater understanding of animals comes from the lab of Tech associate professor of physics Flavio Fenton.

Fenton has created extensive models of hearts after studying fish, mice and horses. His detailed electronic models are a tool to researchers and veterinarians around the world.

One project is focused on fostering a more symbiotic relationship between pets and humans.

The Tech-based Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations (FIDO) is an effort led by faculty member and dog lover Melody Jackson, PhD Computer Science.

Jackson, an associate professor of computer science and director of Tech’s Center for Biointerface Research, created a vest for canines that is equipped with several sensors.

A dog can trigger a sensor by nipping or nudging it, movements that send audible cues to the dog’s owner. The technology could be of use for service or rescue dogs.

“Currently, dogs can only communicate with people by barking or through body language. Sometimes that isn’t good enough,” Jackson says. “The sensors can give them a voice they’ve never had.”

The FIDO vest for canines is equipped with several sensors. A dog can trigger a sensor by nipping or nudging it, movement that send audible cues to the dog’s owner
The FIDO vest for canines is equipped with several sensors. A dog can trigger a sensor by nipping or nudging it, movements that send audible cues to the dog’s owner.

Caring for Research Animals

All Tech researchers whose work involves live specimens use as few animals as possible and follow strict regulations to ensure humane treatment.

These regulations are enforced by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, a group that monitors all research and teaching activities at Georgia Tech involving vertebrate animals and makes certain it follows guidelines in the Federal Animal Welfare Act.

The IACUC reviews any activity involving animals before animals are used, and the committee meets monthly to review protocols. IACUC responsibilities include frequent inspections and documentation.

“At the deepest level, I owe animals the best possible care,” says Richard Nichols, professor and chair of the School of Applied Physiology at Tech and director of the Neurophysiology Lab, whose animal research augments his study of the physiology of human locomotion. “I feel particularly qualified to make sure of the humane treatment of my animals, and I regard it as a personal obligation.”

Learn more about the Georgia Tech Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and the Institute’s policies regarding research animals.

Written by: Van Jensen

The study discovered a path from simple to complex compounds amid Earth’s prebiotic soup. More than 4 billion years ago, amino acids could have been attached together, forming peptides. These peptides ultimately may have led to the proteins and enzymes necessary for life’s biochemistry, as we know it.

In the new study, scientists analyzed samples from an experiment Miller performed in 1958. To the reaction flask, Miller added a chemical that at the time wasn’t widely thought to have been available on early Earth. The reaction had successfully formed peptides, the new study found. The new study also successfully replicated the experiment and explained why the reaction works.

“It was clear that the results from this old experiment weren’t some sort of artifact. They were real,” said Jeffrey Bada, distinguished professor of marine chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the UC San Diego. Bada was a former student and colleague of Miller’s.

The study was supported by the Center for Chemical Evolution at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the NASA Astrobiology Program. The study was published online June 25 in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.The work was primarily a collaboration between UC San Diego and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Eric Parker, the study’s lead author, was an undergraduate student in Bada’s laboratory and is now a graduate student at Georgia Tech.

Jeffrey Bada was Stanley Miller’s second graduate student. The two were close and collaborated throughout Miller’s career. After Miller suffered a severe stroke in 1999, Bada inherited boxes of experimental samples from Miller’s lab. While sorting through the boxes, Bada saw “electric discharge sample” in Miller’s handwriting on the outside of one box.

“I opened it up and inside were all these other little boxes,” Bada said. “I started looking at them, and realized they were from all his original experiments; the ones he did in 1953 that he wrote the famous paper in Science on, plus a whole assortment of others related to that. It’s something that should rightfully end up in the Smithsonian.”

The boxes of unanalyzed samples had been preserved and carefully marked, down to the page number where the experiment was described in Miller’s laboratory notebooks. The researchers verified that the contents of the box of samples were from an electric discharge experiment conducted with cyanamide in 1958 when Miller was at the Department of Biochemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University.

An electric discharge experiment simulates early Earth conditions using relatively simple starting materials. The reaction is ignited by a spark, simulating lightning, which was likely very common on the early Earth.

The 1958 reaction samples were analyzed by Parker and his current mentor, Facundo M. Fernández, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech. They conducted liquid chromatography- and mass spectrometry-based analyses and found that the reaction samples from 1958 contained peptides. Scientists from NASA’s Johnson Space Center and Goddard Space Flight Center were also involved in the analysis.

The research team then set out to replicate the experiment. Parker designed a way to do the experiment using modern equipment and confirmed that the reaction created peptides. 

“What we found were some of the same products of polymerization that we found in the original samples,” Parker said. “This corroborated the data that we collected from analyzing the original samples.”

In the experiment from 1958, Stanley Miller had the idea to use the organic compound cyanamide in the reaction.  Scientists had previously thought that the reaction with cyanamide would work only in acidic conditions, which likely wasn’t widely available on early Earth. The new study showed that reactive intermediates produced during the synthesis of amino acids enhanced peptide formation under the basic conditions associated with the spark discharge experiment.

“What we’ve done is shown that you don’t need acid conditions; you just need to have the intermediates involved in amino acid synthesis there, which is very reasonable,” Bada said.

Why Miller added cyanamide to the reaction will probably never be known. Bada can only speculate. In 1958, Miller was at Columbia University in New York City. Researchers at both Columbia and the close-by Rockefeller Institute were at the center of studies on how to analyze and make peptides and proteins in the lab, which had been demonstrated for the first time in 1953 (the same year that Miller published his famous origin of life paper). Perhaps while having coffee with colleagues someone suggested that cyanamide – a chemical used in the production of pharmaceuticals – might have been available on the early Earth and might help make peptides if added to Miller’s reaction.

“Everybody who would have been there and could verify this is gone, so we’re just left to scratch our heads and say ‘how’d he get this idea before anyone else,’” Bada said.

The latest study is part of an ongoing analysis of Stanley Miller’s old experiments. In 2008, the research team found samples from 1953 that showed a much more efficient synthesis than Stanley published in Science in 1953. In 2011, the researchers analyzed a 1958 experiment that used hydrogen sulfide as a gas in the electric discharge experiment. The reactions produced a more diverse array of amino acids that had been synthesized in Miller’s famous 1953 study. Eric Parker was the lead author on the 2011 study.

“It’s been an amazing opportunity to work with a piece of scientific history,” Parker said.

This research is supported by the Center for Chemical Evolution at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the NASA Astrobiology Program under award number NSF CHE-1004570. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: Eric T. Parker, et al., “A Plausible Simultaneous Synthesis of Amino Acids and Simple Peptides on the Primordial Earth.” (Angewandte Chemie, June 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201403683

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Writer: Brett Israel 

“My two favorite demos were the cardiovascular demo, in which we had dissections of pig and chicken hearts prepared for the kids to learn about how blood is pumped through our bodies, and the edible cell demo, in which kids made their own large-scale cells out of candy that resembled different cellular organelles, and learned about what each of them does along the way,” Blum says.

“For the Ting Lab tour, we had demonstrations set up for the kids with their parents and grandparents to teach them how we study sensorimotor control of posture and balance,” he adds. “We were able to demonstrate how we elicit reactive postural responses experimentally by having volunteers stand on our motorized platform and moving it to throw them off balance. In addition to the platform, we showed them how we can record their motions and use electromyography to measure the neural response to the movement of the platform. It was great to see both the kids and their parents asking questions about what our lab does, and hopefully learning about neuroscience from the experience.”

Bounce houses in the bio-complex, a hands-on experiments table, the lab tours filled with kids wearing lab coats, balloons and ice cream – all in all, not your typical day at the office. Donna Sibble, business administrator in the Coulter Department, brought her grandson Julian, who enjoyed the magic show (Professor Garrett Stanley, complete with cape) and the experiments, but was especially thrilled to visit Ross Ethier’s lab, where they were dissecting a pig’s eyeball.

“On our way home,” Donna says, “he pleaded with me to stop by the store to buy Borax and Elmer’s Glue so that he could replicate the ‘silly putty’ he made at the experiment table. I truly look forward to bringing him again next year.”

Now, the researchers have taken an even closer peek. They froze ant rafts and scanned them with a miniature CT scan machine to look at the strongest part of the structure – the inside – to discover how opaque ants connect, arrange and orient themselves with each other.

“Now we can see how every brick is connected,” said Georgia Tech Assistant Professor David Hu. “It’s kind of like looking inside a warehouse and seeing the scaffolding and I-beams.”

He found a lot of beams.

On average, each ant in a raft connects to 4.8 neighbors. Ants have six legs, but using their claws, adhesive pads and mandibles, each critter averages nearly 14 connections. Large ants can have up to 21. Out of the 440 ants scanned, 99 percent of them had all of their legs attached to their neighbors. The connectivity produces enough strength to keep rafts intact despite the pull of rough currents.

Hu and his team also noticed that the insects use their legs to extend the distances between their neighbors.

“Increasing the distance keeps the raft porous and buoyant, allowing the structure to stay afloat and bounce back to the surface when strong river currents submerge it,” said Nathan Mlot, a Georgia Tech graduate student in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering who worked on both studies.

Mlot and the rest of the research team also found that smaller ants tend to fill in the spaces around large ants. This keeps water from seeping in and prevents weak spots in the raft. The insects, large and small, arrange perpendicularly rather than parallel. This adds to the adaptability of the raft, allowing it to expand and contract based on the conditions. The same is true when ants build towers and bridges for safety and survivability.

One thing the CT scan can’t solve, however: how the ants know where to go and what to do. Their cooperation is a mystery the research team hasn’t figured out – yet.  

“Fire ants are special engineers,” said Hu, a faculty member in the Schools of Mechanical Engineering and Biology. “They are the bricklayers and the bricks. Somehow they build and repair their structures without a leader or knowing what is happening. They just react and interact.”

Better understanding of this phenomenon could lead to new applications for people and machines. For instance, Hu envisions robots than can link together to build larger robots or bridges made of materials that can self-repair.

“If ants can do it, maybe humans can create things that can too.”

This study appears in the June 11 edition of The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Reference: Foster, P. C., Mlot, N. J., Lin, A. and Hu, D. L. (2014). Fire ants actively control spacing and orientation within self-assemblages. J. Exp. Biol. 217, 2089-2100.

This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant PHY-1255127. Any conclusions expressed are those of the principal investigator and may not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

This material is based upon work supported by the Army Research Office under Award Number W911NF-12-R-0011. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Army Research Office.

“We have the license to think ahead of what might be next, to think about the military scenarios that might eventually involve the United States, and the kind of technologies that can be most useful,” says Steve Cross, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. As such, Tech ranks among the top 10 academic institutions in the country that support the U.S. Department of Defense, and the overall defense industry and intelligence community, Cross says.

Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments—a nonprofit public policy think tank—agrees about Tech’s crucial role in defense R&D. Clark says Tech stands apart from most research universities in its strong relationship with the U.S. government and defense contractors. Only a few such as Tech “act as kind of an adjunct to government labs,” Clark says. Through the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and within Tech’s nationally ranked academic units, the Institute asa whole conducts a broad array of both basic and applied research, including in areas such as unmanned systems, computer miniaturization, electromagnetics and cyber warfare, that’s beyond the norm for academic institutions.

In FY2013, Tech received a total of $640 million in research awards from all sources. Of that, the DoD granted the Institute $301.4 million for defense research, with the lion’s share ($263.6 million) going to GTRI. Established as the Engineering Experiment Station in 1934, GTRI took off in World War II when researchers, supported by faculty at the School of Physics and the School of Electrical Engineering, started work on microwave technology in support of military radar development. Then, with the beginning of the Cold War, researchers deepened their involvement in electronic warfare while adding computers to their arsenal. Most recently, GTRI has been focusing a lot of its efforts countering cyber attacks. “That’s been a large growth area here as the cyber threat has become a much greater risk,” Cross says.

Though defense-funded technology developed at Tech clearly has a military use in mind, there are civilian applications as well. For example, a pattern-recognition software program designed to anticipate an adversary’s moves could be used to analyze a patient’s electronic medical history and suggest courses of treatment. Similarly, all the robotics, manufacturing, sensor and computer vision technologies employed in a weapons system could help “automate an industrial processing plant, which may be dirty, smelly and really an unsafe place,” Cross says.

In the stories to come, we examine some of the newest defense technologies being researched and developed at Tech.

Staunching Blood Loss on the Battlefield

Tech biomedical engineers are developing a new medical treatment that could save the lives of troops who have suffered serious injury on the battlefield. Funded by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Institutes of Health, a GT team is developing artificial blood platelets that, when injected intravenously, would force wounds to form a scab much faster than the human body does on its own.

“The goal is to develop technology to help wounded warriors stop bleeding,” says Thomas Barker, associate professor of biomedical engineering. The hope is that, for frontline troops fighting at remote locations, the artificial blood platelets could significantly reduce combat fatalities. Barker imagines scenarios where the injection could even be taken prophylactically by soldiers.

“Obviously the technology allows you to treat combat wounds, but we think you might be able to take this before battle to boost your clotting system, too,” he says.

The artificial blood platelets, which are composed of hydrogels, are activated by the body’s own mechanisms when a person is wounded. “The particles stick to the wound where bleeding is occurring and help the body stop blood loss,” Barker says.

Barker and his team have been working on the new technology for about two years and have already demonstrated the artificial blood platelets in animal models. Those trials showed that the artificial platelets could clot blood 30 percent faster than the body’s own natural processes alone. However, the researchers have yet to perform human testing.

In the civilian world, there are even more immense ramifications of this research. Not only could artificial blood platelets help stop blood loss from injuries, they could also improve recovery from surgery and aid those suffering from blood disorders.

“They could be used following massive trauma or in patients with clotting disorders like hemophilia, or to solve clotting problems associated with chemotherapy,” Barker says.

The platelets research is currently in preclinical trials, and Tech’s biomedical engineering team is in discussion with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to move the process forward. Though the technology is still in its early stages, with the FDA’s approval, it could find its way into the hands of doctors both on and off the battlefield soon.

“We’re hoping that these blood platelets could be available and making a positive impact within a few years,” Barker says.

Protecting Public Utilities from Cyber Attacks

There are many ways to attack a nation’s weak points. One of the sneakier methods is to hack the computer network of a public utility and wreak all sorts of sabotage, such as programming turbines to fail or, in the case of a power company, causing a blackout.

Last September, the Department of Energy awarded a consortium led by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and other Georgia Tech academic departments $5 million to develop a security suite to safeguard electrical utilities from cyber attack. At present, a determined hacker can insert malicious commands into the industrial control system of a utility, trip a circuit breaker and cause an electrical grid to fail, says GTRI research scientist Seth Walters, one of the principal investigators on the three-year project.

The idea, of course, is to stop such malicious commands. But how can you identify them?

“One of the challenges is that the electrical grid and the utilities on it are all designed to operate in a certain way,” Walters says. “And part of their fundamental operations includes command-and-control messages that might be dangerous at one particular time but harmless at another time.”

In the past, IT security professionals tended to apply traditional corporate network solutions to the electrical grid. However, this cut-and-paste approach did not quite work out given the differences between the two systems, Walters says.

One major issue is that a utility network has serious data sequencing requirements to function properly. “You can’t just take an enterprise system security tool and apply it to an industrial control system network because you might harm the timeliness of information that’s being transmitted,” he says.

To defend a utility, a software engineer needs to understand the industrial control system network well enough to distinguish a harmful command-and-control message from an innocuous one. That means installing the right intrusion detection sensors and having a simulation tool that can model a command’s future effect immediately in the present.

“The key to this technology is the ability to perform faster-than-real-time simulation of the system,” says Sakis Meliopoulos, MS EE74, PhD EE 76, professor of computer engineering at Tech. “This means we need to determine what will happen to the system for the next one to two minutes with computations that can be performed in fractions of a second.”

This approach will require more computing power of the network. In addition, there will be time delays on commands, but that, Meliopoulos says, “will be minimal.”

The project is set to begin in another month or two.

Testing UAV Sensors on the Cheap

Got an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sensor payload in need of testing? Well, Georgia Tech is set to offer defense customers an experimental aircraft on which to place it—at a fraction of the cost it would take to integrate that same payload on a conventional UAV.

The new test bed is called the GTRI Airborne Unmanned Sensor System (GAUSS). “It gives us the ability to offer proof of principle tests to customers at a price that’s reasonable, at a schedule that’s reasonable,” says Mike Brinkmann, MS EE 91, principal research engineer for sensor packages for the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

GAUSS is based on the Griffon Aerospace Outlaw ER test UAV, which Tech purchased from Griffon and subsequently modified. The test bed has a 16-foot wingspan and weighs about 140 pounds, with a 35-pound payload capacity. Under Georgia Tech’s authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), GAUSS can operate at a maximum ceiling of 5,000 feet, but it is capable of flying higher.

Some of the modifications GTRI researchers made to the Outlaw ER are immediately apparent. “In particular, we put pods on the wings to carry the radar system and power supply, and we made some modifications internally,” says Mike Heiges, AE 85, MS AE 86, PhD AE 89, GTRI’s principal aircraft research engineer for the project.

To prove it can test a variety of sensors on GAUSS, GTRI is integrating three different systems. The first is a visual light camera, the second is an RF signal detection package; and the third is a four-channel, side-looking radar designed to map the ground.

The radar is one of the first systems with these capabilities designed to be fitted on an aircraft as small as the GAUSS, and should be flying onboard it soon. “The two sensors that we have—the signals recorder and also the radar—we’re hoping will open some doors for GTRI to conduct sponsored research with a number of customers that would like to have combinations or variations on those things,” Brinkmann says.

Heiges adds that GRTI has an advantage over potential competitors because the Insitute has authorizations from the FAA to allow it to fly the GAUSS at several locations around the country.

“That’s a huge deal,” Brinkmann says.

Radar Jamming with an “Angry Kitten”

The rules of electronic warfare are simple. Make the most of the electromagnetic spectrum and deny the other guys access to it. In other words, jam them. But actual radar jamming is easier said than done given the emergence of frequency-hopping radar and communications networks being used by today’s military aircraft.

So Georgia Tech Research Institute engineers began work last June on integrating machine-learning algorithms into Angry Kitten, a developmental jamming system designed to employ new electronic attack and shielding techniques.

The Angry Kitten team hopes that, by incorporating an adaptive learning approach into jammers, they will get a system “that can think on the fly” and overcome the electronic protection of advanced targets, says GTRI research engineer Stan Sutphin, MS ECE 12.

The result of three years of internal R&D projects, Angry Kitten probes the vulnerabilities of friendly sensor systems before they are deployed on the battlefield. In addition, Angry Kitten serves as a test bed for new forms of electronic attack, which might be used against an opponent. In doing so, it explores techniques and technologies not employed in jammers built under programs of record, which tend to focus on broader bandwidth and more power.

The current challenge the GTRI electronic warfare tool is tackling is waveform agile systems.

The standard approach to jamming is to first identify the target and then choose a corresponding electronic attack from a library of jamming techniques. However, this attack-by-rote does not account for enemy adaptation. As emitters—communications systems and radars—get more advanced, they behave less predictably and finding “a canned response for them gets to be very difficult,” Sutphin says.

By contrast, a machine-learning algorithm will teach the jammer to learn from past experiences, so that when it encounters the same type of target again, its response will be more sophisticated and hopefully, faster and more successful. If a technique failed the last time, a jammer might try a variant and watch how the target responds to it and adjust accordingly with a feedback loop.

“There has been a huge interest from the Department of Defense in Angry Kitten-like technology,” Sutphin says, noting that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is pursuing its own Adaptive Radar Countermeasures program, which takes a similar approach.

Helping Helicopters Fight a Dread Enemy: Ice

The American Helicopter Society does not give just anyone a Howard Hughes Award. In April, Lakshmi Sankar, MS AE 75, PhD AE 77, associate chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Aerospace Engineering, shared this honor with a government-industry team seeking to model ice formation on helicopter rotors—an effort that aims to improve flight safety, reduce the cost of all-weather certification and help develop the U.S. military’s Future Vertical Lift helicopters.

Ice formation on the blades of a helicopter is a serious problem. “The leading edge is very important for lift production,” Sankar says. “If you have a big chunk of ice over the leading edge, then the rotor may stall and the helicopter will lose altitude.”

What’s more, uneven ice formation on the blades can cause vibrations, putting stress on components, and ice flying off the main rotor can damage the tail rotor or another sensitive part of the helicopter. Finally, even if the worst does not happen, ice on the blades increases drag on the helicopter and increases fuel consumption.

Airplanes typically rely on anti-icing technology to melt ice on their wings. However, helicopters have limited heating capabilities given their small engines, which supply the electricity on the heaters to the blades. “So this is a very important issue, to be able to predict how much ice will accumulate, how much will it melt, is it going to break or fly off because of the centrifugal forces on the blade,” Sankar says.

In 2011, Georgia Tech partnered with NASA Glenn Research Center and leading aerospace companies to work on the High Fidelity Icing Analysis and Validation for Rotorcraft project. As part of that project, Sankar and his team developed a software model that combines aerodynamics with the structural dynamics of a rotor blade bending under a load—and then combined it with LEWICE, a NASA Glenn program that models ice accretion.

If the model is proven accurate, certifying helicopters for all-weather operations will be cheaper because fewer test flights will be required. Likewise, it could prevent mid-development redesigns of rotor blades because the computer model could test designs even before a vehicle is built. In addition, Sankar sees the model supporting the development of Future Vertical Lift, i.e. the next generation of, helicopters.

So far, the model has fared well against wind tunnel and flight tests, but more research is required. “Hopefully, the government will give us some more funding,” Sankar says.

Fighting the Hidden Effects of Bomb Blasts

Time will tell whether the data collected from soldiers caught in roadside bombings will correlate with late-onset brain injuries. But thanks to the Integrated Blast Effects Sensor Suite (I-BESS), developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), medical professionals may have some incident histories from which to draw conclusions about the effects of high G-force acceleration and overpressure on the human body.

In July 2011, the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force tapped GTRI to create what became I-BESS. Then-vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Gen. Peter Chiarelli wanted to address the “invisible injury”—traumatic brain injury—and he needed to do it quickly. The opportunity to collect data was disappearing due to the impending drawdown in Afghanistan, says Brian Liu, EE 05, the head of the Advanced Human Integration Branch at GTRI’s Electronic Systems Laboratory.

Racing against the clock, GRTI researchers started fielding I-BESS in the summer of 2012. For dismounted soldiers, a mix of accelerometers, gyros and pressure transducers were installed into standard vests and headgear. These devices record, time-stamp and measure the effects of an encounter with a roadside bomb. Similarly, there are sensors affixed to the hull of soldiers’ vehicles and inserted inside their seats, with all the systems uploading data to a central storage unit.

“So the system not only is on the soldier, but it’s also on the frame of the vehicle and also on the seat of the vehicle. And those are all integrated and time-tagged so that the data would allow you to go back and reconstruct which soldier was in which seat and what the soldier experienced,” Liu says.

In developing I-BESS, Liu and his team looked to leverage componentry already used in the commercial world. However, the wholesale borrowing of equipment was simply not possible. They couldn’t just take, for example, a vehicle sensor used in NASCAR races to record crash data because the crumpling of a car frame “is a very different event, dynamically, from an explosion,” he says.

Since I-BESS’s initial fielding, GTRI has already collected data from troops and passed it along to the Army’s Joint Trauma Analysis and Prevention of Injury in Combat Program. Now the GTRI team is discussing next steps. “We are working with the Army to look at some of their requirements for future soldier sensor systems that are not identical to I-BESS, but are similar in nature and similar in mission,” he says.

Saving Energy and Money on Military Outposts

Transporting fuel to a remote U.S. military outpost in Afghanistan is no easy feat. There are unpaved roads; there are Taliban ambushes. So it’s best that when the fuel does arrive, it’s to be used sparingly.

That’s why researchers at Georgia Tech are working with the Office of Naval Research to develop computer modeling tools that optimize energy consumption at forward operating bases, says Yogendra Joshi, the John M. McKenney and Warren D. Shiver Distinguished Chair at Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

To fully appreciate the situation, consider that it reportedly takes 22 gallons of fuel per day to sustain a soldier or Marine in the field, and thanks to the difficult logistical situation in Afghanistan, the price per gallon is astronomical. “We’re talking about fuel that is not $3.90 per gallon, but about an estimated $200 per gallon delivered at a forward operating base,” Joshi says.

The software tools Joshi and his team are working on would allow the military to use its liquid fuels as efficiently as possible by simulating the power consumption of appliances found on a given base. Georgia Tech is focusing its efforts on heating, cooling, lighting and energy storage technologies because of its significant resident expertise in those fields, Joshi says. The idea is to optimize the electricity consumption by those systems.

Once the software tools are proven to match real-word power consumption at remote bases, they could be scaled up and applied to large installations, potentially reducing liquid fuel consumption significantly. In addition, the models, while being developed for the military, could also be used for disaster relief or other civil applications—anywhere that might be “off-grid,” Joshi says.

The project started this January and is projected to run for four years.

Designing Super Long-Lasting Computers

Think of the perfect embedded computer. Think of a computer so energy-efficient that it can last 75 times longer than today’s systems. Researchers at Georgia Tech are helping the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) develop such a computer as part of an initiative called Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies, or PERFECT.

“The program is looking at how do we come to a new paradigm of computing where running time isn’t necessarily the constraint, but how much power and battery that we have available is really the new constraint,” says David Bader, executive director of high-performance computing at the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

If the project is successful, it could result in computers far smaller and orders of magnitude more efficient than today’s machines. It could also mean that the computer mounted tomorrow on an unmanned aircraft or ground vehicle, or even worn by a soldier would use less energy than a larger device, while still being as powerful.

Georgia Tech’s part in the DARPA-led PERFECT effort is called GRATEFUL, which stands for Graph Analysis Tackling power-Efficiency, Uncertainty and Locality. Headed by Bader and co-investigator Jason Riedy, GRATEFUL focuses on algorithms that would process vast stores of data and turn it into a graphical representation in the most energy-efficient way possible.

The ultimate goal is to get an algorithmic framework that delivers supercomputer capabilities on a small, power-restricted platform.

One approach to reducing power consumption is to reduce the level of data collection. For example, when looking for a needle in a haystack, you don’t necessarily need to inspect every piece of hay. “What we’re looking at is collecting the minimal data necessary to make accurate decisions,” Bader says.

For now, the Tech team is applying GRATEFUL to social network analysis. But that same technology could also be used for any number of security applications, such as identifying hackers trying to break into a network. And, eventually, the technology developed under GRATEFUL could find its way onto smaller, more efficient computers in unmanned aerial vehicles or worn by soldiers.

The team is currently one year into a potentially five-year effort. Bader says most of the work is still in the elementary stages, but the team is developing proofs of concept software. “Our goal is to create architecture-independent software that can run across multiple hardware platforms and still perform extremely well,” he says.

Pushing the Envelope with Mini-Radars

The Institute has a long history in developing radar systems, which harkens back to World War II. Today, Tech researchers are working to develop radar systems that are much smaller and lighter than anything currently deployed through a new type of wideband, tunable, true time delay.

Modern active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars are complex affairs. They rely on electrical delay cabling to help keep all the electromagnetic pulses firing to and from individual transmit/receive modules in proper sequence.

But separating electrical pulses, which travel essentially at the speed of light, requires lots of cabling—meters of it, in fact. And all this cabling takes up space, weight and power inside the radar, says Kyle Davis, EE 09, MS ECE 13, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). By contrast, Georgia Tech’s new wideband, tunable, true time delay, which is a device used to slow down an electronic signal, uses thin strips of coated film to convert radio frequency (RF) energy into sound waves and then back into RF energy.

Sound waves travel far slower than light waves, so the new device does not require meters of spooling between Point A and Point B to create a signal delay. “Our lengths are on the order of micrometers,” says Davis, adding that this translates into smaller, lighter radars.

Facilitating the operation of the Institute’s acoustic time-delay device are film-based strips of material. “Our materials were sputtered thin films: metals and dielectrics and a piezoelectric layer of zinc oxide,” says Ryan Westafer, CmpE 05, MS ECE 06, PhD ECE 11, a GTRI project research engineer.

Davis says the RF energy-acoustic wave technology being developed at Tech could be used for beam-steering in AESA radars. In addition, it could be leveraged for electronic warfare beam-forming and beam-steering, power amp linearization, electronic countermeasures, radar and antenna testing, and RF interferometers.

The wideband, tunable, true time delay project started about three years ago using internal Institute funding, and with enough money, the team could finish development relatively quickly. “The current components have a path to being very robust,” Davis says. “If a program had sufficient funding to rapidly mature this technology, two to three years would not be out of the question.” All the team needs to make this happen is an external funding partner.

Studying Animals to Build Smarter Robots

Can studying the mating behavior of birds help the U.S. military develop better unmanned systems? That’s what Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, and other researchers aim to find out as part of the U.S. Navy-funded Heterogeneous Unmanned Networked Teams (HUNT) Project.

Initiated in 2008, the HUNT Project is a multi-phased study that looks at assorted animal interactions—from wolves stalking an elk to squirrels hiding acorn caches—as inspiration for developing new algorithms to guide intelligent autonomous systems. For now, Arkin has been working with computer models and little bots in the lab. But things can always scale up to larger, more robust unmanned vehicles.

“That’s the beauty of the basic research,” he says. “It’s not limited to a physical type of platform.”

One of the earliest subjects of HUNT was “lekking” behavior in birds, in which a group of males gathers around—but not too closely—a very handsome specimen (a “hotshot”) in order to mate with females. This became the basis for seeing how one could distribute autonomous systems behind enemy lines “without using strict formation control” but in a way that “maximizes the likelihood of encounter” with the enemy, Arkin says.

In 2010 and 2011, Arkin and his team moved on to wolf packs. Initially, they thought the wolves coordinated with each other when hunting elk. But Dan MacNulty, a professor of wildlife ecology at Utah State University, disabused them of that notion. “When we brought Dan in the first time, he informed us that there is no coordination,” he says. “They are all individual, greedy agents.”

So how exactly did they work as a pack without explicit rules or communication? One possible explanation was that a predator chasing down an elk indicated to the others that the hunted animal was weak. So applying a probabilistic model to the stage of a hunt, Arkin tried to “replicate that behavior in robotic systems to see if we could do the same sort of thing both in simulations and platforms.” And he succeeded.

Following on the wolf pack research, Arkin then looked at bird mobbing, in which birds gather to drive off a stronger predator. Did it make sense for a weak bird to feign strength and participate in the mobbing? His simulations demonstrated that under certain conditions, yes, it did. And those same lessons could be applied to a low-power robot or one that’s out of ammo.

Arkin is now looking more broadly at robot deception. But, he explains, ultimately all of the pieces of HUNT relate to one another as examples of biologically inspired group behaviors.