On February 28, Amy Angert, Christine Bacon, Cameron Ghalambor, Cara Ostrom, John Paul, Arathi Seshadri, and Seema Sheth participated in the Putnam Elementary Science Carnival. In conjunction with colleagues from BSPM, they organized and ran several activities and displays to teach kids of all ages about evolution by natural selection. Christine Bacon received an award for best graduate student display for her display and activity on homology.

The winners of the 2009 Department of Biology Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring are in! Graduate Student Teaching Awards: Chris Cohu and Meribeth Huizinga; Undergraduate Teaching Award: Marinus Pilon; Mentoring of Undergraduate Research Awards: Joe Covi and Greg Florant; Graduate Education and Mentoring Award: Mike Antolin. Congratulations to all of our awardees! The awards ceremony will be held in E112 A/Z on Tuesday, April 21st, at 3:40 PM before the departmental seminar.

Graduate student Joe Qiao (Anderson lab) was awarded Highest Honors (top 5%) at the Cell and Molecular Biology Poster Competition held at CSU on Feb. 27 for his poster "Altered crossover interference among MLH1 foci is associated with changes in sister chromatid cohesion proteins during meiosis in tomato."

Graduate student Sharon Poessel of the Angeloni Lab was accepted into the Presidential Management Fellows Program. She will receive a two-year paid fellowship after graduation that will help her transition into a permanent position with a federal agency. Congratulations, Sharon!

Heather Blackburn, a GDPE Ph.D. student of Professor Jim Detling, successfully defended her dissertation entitled "Nonlinearity in concumer response to food availability: Fragmentation and resource heterogeneity decrease consumer success."

Assistant Professor Chris Funk was awarded a National Geographic Society-Waitt Grant to study the scale of speciation in the Amazonian frog Physalaemus petersi.

Assistant Professor Shane Kanatous presented an invited seminar on March 20, at CSU Pueblo, entitled "How do you build a marine carnivore? The potential of microarray and proteomic techniques to identify the molecular regulation of the ontogeny of skeletal muscle adaptations in Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii)"

Graduate Student Andrew Kanarek gave an invited presentation "Allee effects and invsion success through coupled evolutionary and ecological dynamics" at the Ecology and Evolution of Invasions Workshop at Lake Tahoe, CA, March 19-22. Assistant Professor Colleen Webb also attended the workshop.

In March Prof. Don Mykles traveled to California for his research on the endocrine control of molting in lobsters at the UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab.

Special Asst. Prof. Lorrie Anderson presented a seminar in February to the CSU Cell and Molecular program and in March to the Univ. Northern Colo. (Greeley) on "Meiotic recombination and sister chromatid cohesion."

Postdoc John Paul (Angert Lab) gave an invited presentation at the Fifth Annual Early Career Scientists Symposium, "Using Phylogenies in Ecology", held at the University of Michigan, March 14th, 2009.

Assistant Professor Chris Funk just returned from three weeks in Ecuador studying speciation mechanisms in the Amazonian frog Physalaemus petersi.

Drs. Patricia Bedinger and Steve Stack, with research associate Paul Covey and other Interspecific Reproductive Barriers in Tomato (IRBT) collaborators head to Peru April 16th, to perform pollination field studies of native populations of wild tomatoes and present at the 'Symposium on Reproduction in the Solanaceae' at the Center International de la Papa (CIP) in La Molina, Lima, Peru. Follow a web-log of their adventure at http://www.irbtomato.blogspot.com.

Assistant Professor Shane B. Kanatous, former technician Linnea Pearson and Amber Cable (graduate students) are co-authors of "How do you build a marine carnivore? The potential of microarray and proteomic techniques to identify the molecular regulation of the ontogeny of skeletal muscle adaptations in Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii)" published in the proceedings of the 4th Meeting of Comparative Physiologists & Biochemists in Africa - Mara, pages 395-407, 2008.

Mayack C, Naug D, 2009 Energetic stress in the honeybee Apis mellifera from Nosema ceranae infection. J. Invert. Pathol. 100:185-188.

Simmons, M.P. 2008. Celastraceae. Pages 321-322 in Nuevo Catálogo de la Flora de Venezuela (O. Hokche, P.E. Berry, O. Huber, eds.). Fundación Instituto Botánico de Venezuela, Caracas.

The MS entitled “Copper homeostasis“ by Jason L. Burkhead, Kathryn A. Gogolin Reynolds, Salah E. Abdel-Ghany, Christopher M. Cohu , and Marinus Pilon was accepted for publication as a Thansley review in New Phytologist

Postdoc Melanie Murphy in Chris Funk's lab is the lead author on a paper recently published in Ecography: "Evaluation of a novel approach for representing 'populations' as continuous surfaces in landscape genetics."

An article by Assistant Professor Shane B. Kanatous was featured in an Editorial in Focus by the American Journal of Physiology, Cell. Both hypoxia and work are required to enhance expression of myoglobin in skeletal muscle. Focus on "Hypoxia reprograms calcium signaling and regulates myoglobin expression". Am J Physiol Cell Physiol. 2009 Mar; 296(3):C390-2.

A.S.N. Reddy has been appointed as a monitoring editor of Plant Physiology.