Professor Don Mykles was elected program officer for comparative biochemistry & physiology in the Society for Integrative Biology for 2007.

Congrats to graduate student Paul Covey and Associate Professor Lianne Pilon-Smits for their winning submissions to the Biology Student Research Symposium Annual Haiku Competition. Here are their winning Haikus!

I say Solanum
You say Lycopersicum
Just say tomato
by Paul Covey

Another speaker
Who is this guy anyway
Why did I sign up?
by Lianne Pilon-Smits

Ph.D. student Reesa Conrey and her adviser Professor Mike Antolin have received a grant from the Colorado Division of Wildlife, to support Reesa's dissertation on the ecology of burrowing owls east of Fort Collins on the Pawnee National Grassland.

Professor Diana Wall traveled to South Africa and Kenya between November 6-27 with NREL post-doc Ed Ayres. They are field sampling the NSF-funded Global Patterns of Soil Biodiversity project which aims to determine how patterns below ground biodiversity vary as a function of latitude.

Assistant Professor Dhruba Naug and Ph.D student Dylan George presented posters describing their research on infectious disease in honeybees and prairie dogs at the annual NSF/NIH Ecology of Infectious Diseases principal investigators' meeting in Atlanta.

Assistant Professor Mark Simmons will spend all of December 2006 and January 2007 in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean, collecting plant specimens to carry out research funded by the National Geographic Society.

Simmons, M. P., L.-B. Zhang, C. T. Webb and K. Müller. 2007. A penalty of using anonymous dominant markers (AFLPs, ISSRs, and RAPDs) for phylogenetic inference. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 42: 528-542.

John L. Freeman*, Colin F. Quinn*, Matthew A. Marcus, Sirine Fakra, and Elizabeth A.H. Pilon-Smits. Selenium-Tolerant Diamondback Moth Disarms Hyperaccumulator Plant Defense. Current Biology 16: 2181-2192 (Nov 21, 2006). *shared first authors

Naug D, Smith BH, 2007. Experimentally induced change in infectious period affects transmission dynamics in a social group. Proc R Soc B. 274:61-65.

Julian D. Olden, Julia M. McCarthy, Jeffrey T. Maxted, William W. Fetzer, M. Jake Vander Zanden. 2006. The rapid spread of rusty crayfish (Orconectes rusticus) with observations on native crayfish declines in Wisconsin (U.S.A.): trends over the past 130 years. Biological Invasions:51(2) 224-235

Professor Diana Wall and her research on nematodes and carbon cycling in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica was featured in Science pages of the New York Times on November 21, 2006. One of the small valleys in the region was named Wall Valley in her honor.

Professor Pat Bedinger and her program to engage Honor's Biology students in research on the genetics of species barriers in wild tomatoes was featured in the Fort Collins Coloradoan on November 17, 2006