A. J. Colussi, senior research associate in environmental science and engineering, and colleagues have found that airborne particulates impair the lungs' natural defenses against ozone. Their research focused on what happens when air meets the thin layer of antioxidant-rich fluid that covers our lungs, protecting them from ozone, an air pollutant that pervades major cities. "We found new chemistry at the interfaces separating gases from liquids using a technique that continuously monitors the composition of these interfaces," Colussi says. Under normal physiological conditions, ascorbic acid instantly scavenges ozone, generating innocuous byproducts. However, the researchers discovered that when the fluid is acidic, a pathological condition found in asthmatics, ascorbic acid instead reacts with ozone to form potentially harmful compounds called ozonides. Read more...
Wood is made of three tightly intertwined compounds; taking it apart is a challenge, and termites are among the few known animals that can do it. Professor Jared Leadbetter led a team of researchers from other universities, private industry, and the Department of Energy (DOE) in uncovering the genetic underpinnings and the roles of bacteria in wood digestion by "higher termites." These insects abound in tropical and subtropical ecosystems. What the team found, says Leadbetter, is "a comprehensive set of blueprints for the bacteria that help dismantle wood." This has recently become a focus of interest for those interested in developing an effective, industrial method to convert wood into ethanol. Read more...
Professor of Environmental Microbiology Jared Leadbetter, Biology graduate student Elizabeth Ottesen, and their colleagues announce a new and efficient way of revealing guild-species relationships in complex microbial communities. The approach allows them to discover connections between bacterial cells from natural samples, and the activities encoded by genes. Read more...To digest wood, termites are dependent on the 200 or so diverse microbial species that call termite guts home. Most of these beneficial organisms have never been cultivated in the laboratory. This has made it difficult to determine precisely which species perform the numerous, varied functions relevant to converting woody plant biomass into a material that can be directly used as food and energy by their insect hosts. The breakthrough approach of Professor Jared Leadbetter and his collaborators is to use microfluidic devices, in which thousands of individual cells harvested from the environment can be distributed into separate chambers prior to any gene-based analysis, so that each can be studied as an individual. Read more...
When it comes to tiny motors, the flagella used by bacteria to get around their microscopic worlds are hard to beat. Composed of several tens of different types of protein, a flagellum rotates about in much the same way that a rope would spin if mounted in the chuck of an electric drill, but at much higher speeds--about 300 revolutions per second. Grant Jensen, Assistant Professor of Biology, Gavin Murphy, a graduate student in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and Jared R. Leadbetter, Associate Professor of Environmental Microbiology have succeeded for the first time in obtaining a three-dimensional image of the complete flagellum assembly of a bacteria using a new technology called electron cryotomography. Reporting in Nature, the scientists show in unprecedented detail both the rotor of the flagellum and the stator, or protein assembly that not only attaches the rotor to the cell wall, but also generates the torque that serves to rotate it. The accomplishment is a tour de force within the field of structural biology, through which scientists seek to understand how cells work by determining the shapes and configurations of the proteins that make them up. The results could lead to better-designed nanomachines.
The work of Professor Jared Leadbetter is covered in the April 12th edition of the L.A. Weekly - Gut Reactions: How the contents of a termite's stomach may revolutionize your car...
An unlikely marriage of medical application and environmental engineering has won Dianne Newman, Luce Assistant Professor of Geobiology and Environmental Science and Engineering, one of this year's prestigious funding awards from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Newman joins Caltech's Linda Hsieh-Wilson and 41 other leading American researchers asthis year's new crop of HHMI Investigators.
Professor Tapio Schneider is one of six Caltech professors to receive an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship this year. The Sloan Fellows are selected on the basis of "their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge." Schneider works on understanding climate and the dynamical processes in the atmosphere that determine basic climatic features such as the pole-to-equator temperature gradient and the distribution of water vapor. Developing mathematical models of the large-scale (1000 km) turbulent transport of heat, mass, and water vapor is one central aspect of this research.
Professor Tapio Schneider is the recipient of the first annual James R. Holton Award of the American Geophysical Union. This award was given at the recent AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco and honored Schneider for "outstanding research contributions by a junior atmospheric scientist."
Symposium: Global Circulation of the Atmosphere
November 4 - 6, 2004
Sharp Lecture Hall (155 Arms)
This three-day conference will bring together experts in the theory of the global circulation of the atmosphere, with the aim of assessing the current state of our understanding and defining important outstanding questions. The first day of the conference will focus on tropical circulations, the second day on monsoons and interactions of tropical and extratropical circulations, and the third day on extratropical circulations. Details...
Geobiology graduate student Tanja Bosak and Professor Dianne Newman, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Geobiology and Environmental Science and Engineering, announced their first major success in using a novel method of "growing" bacteria-infested rocks in order to study early life forms. The research could be a significant tool for use in better understanding the history of life on Earth, and perhaps could also be useful in astrobiology. Reporting in the August 23 edition of the journal Geology, the scientists describe their success in growing calcite crusts in the presence and absence of a certain bacterium in order to show that tiny pores found in such rocks can be definitively attributed to microbial presence.
Professor Michael Hoffmann Hui-Ming Hung (PhD '00), and Joon-Wun Kang have been awarded the prestigious Jack Edward McKee Medal for their thorough characterization of a technique that has laid the groundwork for the development of a practical system for the efficacious removal of MTBE from contaminated groundwater. The McKee Medal, named for the past Water Environment Federation (WEF) president and Caltech professor, was created to honor achievement in groundwater protection, restoration, and sustainable use.
Dianne Newman, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Geobiology and Environmental Engineering Science has been awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and will receive $625,000 over five years.
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