Core Priority: New Life Sciences

Laura Harrington is Breaking the Fever and the Mosquitoes That Carry Dengue ▼

Laura Harrington didn't die from dengue fever, but like most of those infected, she experienced excruciating joint, muscle, and eye pain, and was consigned to bed with a raging fever. Lying under her mosquito net in a village in Northern Thailand, she resolved to keep studying the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits the disease.

Eight years later, Harrington and the global team of researchers who study Ae. aegypti have made great strides in understanding its behavior and complex transmission patterns. The team has been awarded a $40 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and deploy genetic strategies to deplete or incapacitate the insects that transmit dengue viruses.

“Our goal is to render Ae. aegypti incapable of transmitting dengue,” says Harrington, a medical entomologist in the college’s Department of Entomology. “My primary role is to conduct laboratory assessments of mosquito mating competitiveness and fitness, establish field sites, and characterize wild populations in the field.”

Within the five-year grant period, the team expects to have developed control methods that target larvae and adult mosquitoes, altered the mosquito’s abilities to transmit dengue viruses, and tested and compared the efficacy of the vectors in field sites approved by local communities and relevant government bodies. The team hopes the methods they develop also can be applied to the control of other major diseases such as malaria.

Harrington uses mark-release-and-recapture techniques, coupled with DNA analysis of mosquito blood meals and hydrocarbon dating, to assess and compare key behavioral characteristics in wild and modified mosquito populations.

She releases wild females in chambers with modified males and wild males to determine which males the females prefer. Harrington and the rest of the team will test subsequent generations for fitness as well as the desired outcome: the mosquitoes’ inability to transmit the dengue virus.

Life Sciences Technology Building: Weill Hall ▼

At 250,000 square feet, Weill Hall serves as Cornell's major point of convergence for hundreds of faculty members from as many as 60 departments representing the biological, physical, engineering, computational, and social sciences.

The discoveries that occur at the interface of these disciplines and take place in this state-of-the-art facility can lead to medical breakthroughs and other innovations that will dramatically improve the lives of people around the world. Programs and research in the building will support and advance genomics, cell and molecular biology, digital technology, and sustainability.

CALS' scientists occupy much of the new building. More than 275 of the college’s faculty members in more than a dozen departments are working in the life sciences. The college has recruited more than half of the 70 new faculty hired for the New Life Sciences Initiative.

“The building will support life sciences research, education, and outreach over the next 50 years and beyond. We want a building that will serve as an intellectual and operation magnet for students, faculty, visitors, and alumni,” says Stephen Kresovich, vice provost for life sciences and CALS professor of plant breeding and genetics.

Extensive research space on each of four floors will be arranged in flexible laboratory suites designed to enable contact and collaboration among researchers. A two-story learning center will contain a conference room, lecture hall, and teleconferencing facility. Large spaces will be dedicated to housing plants, animals, and a biophysics imaging and microscopy facility.

Antje Baumner Teaches Students to Design Biosensors ▼

Antje Baumner introduces sophomores to the amazing marriage of biological and engineering systems that produced the glucose strip and the home pregnancy test.

Among the many things students discover in Baeumner’s introductory survey course Principles of Biological Engineering is how expertise drawn from the life sciences and engineering is used to create biosensors.

“In the future, consumers will be able to buy a home test kit—as easy to use as the pregnancy ones—to know whether the food they’ve bought is free from bacteria that could make them sick,” says Baeumner, an associate professor of biological and environmental engineering. That is the end goal of her research into developing small, cheap, quick, organism-specific biosensors. The sensors could detect a range of pathogens from Salmonella spp. on hamburger to the bacterium that causes strep throat to the pesticide atrazine, a groundwater pollutant.

Baeumner works on a nano scale. She routinely synthesizes nanovesicles, hollow balls 500 times smaller in diameter than a human hair, which, when filled with dye or electrochemically detectable substances, act as a marking device in a sensor.

In her teaching, Baeumner expects more from her students than just learning techniques. She requires that seniors taking her course Biosensors and Bioanalytical Techniques not only design and build a novel biosensor but explain to the class how such a device could impact politics, economics, health, society, ethics, and the environment.

“I want students to go beyond the academic effort and think about the wider consequence of what, as engineers, they are doing,” she explains.

Harvey Hoch Uses Nanotechnology to Study Plant Pathology ▼

Cell biologists in the college are obtaining images by scanning electron microscopy and time-lapse light microscopy that makes rust fungi on nano-fabricated bean leaves look like aliens crawling across the hash marks on a football field.

In reality, the surface features are one ten-millionth to one-millionth of a meter high, and the fungal structures are invisible to the naked eye.

“My colleagues and I use electron beam and photolithography techniques to fabricate topographies that mimic leaf surface features as well as the internal plumbing of plants, and then we use imaging technologies to study how bacteria and fungi invade and colonize the leaf,” explains Harvey Hoch, a plant pathologist at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva.

Testing various infection hypotheses has involved collaborators in facilities as diverse as Cornell’s Nanobiotechnology Center, the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility in Duffield Hall in Ithaca, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca, the plant pathology department in Geneva, as well as colleagues at other institutions.

Being able to investigate life from the point of view of a fungus, a bacterium, or a plant gives researchers the opportunity to learn the detailed mechanisms of the microbe-plant relationship.

Plant pathologists who better understand the topological and chemical relationship between plants and pathogens can provide horticultural scientists with the information they need to breed plants that are better able to resist infection and need less chemical control.

Using Pigs as Models for Human Nutrition Studies ▼

As a CALS undergraduate and graduate student, Koji Yasuda was fighting global mineral deficiencies in human diets. Yasuda, who grew up in Tokyo, Japan, received a B.S. with distinction in research in animal science in 2005, a master’s degree in 2007, and is currently working toward his doctorate in veterinary medicine at Cornell.

Professor Xingen Lei’s swine research team, of which Yasuda was a part, tries to develop an agriculture that balances micronutrients in our foods in order to reduce chronic disease, nutrition-related health problems, and infant mortality. “Pigs’ digestion and metabolism are similar to humans’,” says Yasuda.

Yasuda already has three publications to his credit: his honors thesis, a paper he co-authored with Professor Lei, and a first-authored paper for the Journal of Nutrition. Yasuda was a distinguished recipient of two scholastic awards as an undergraduate as well.

“I chose to attend CALS at Cornell because I believe it has one of the most well-known agricultural and life sciences program in the nation. I wanted to study here so that I could optimize my ability to contribute to the development and sustenance of the world,” he says.

Yasuda’s plans to pursue veterinary medicine will still involve him in nutrition-related health problems, but he would like to contribute to the field in a different way. “There is a large demand for veterinarians who practice preventive and food safety medicine. The most well-known conditions they deal with include avian influenza and E. coli contamination. Poor nutrition and poor management are major causes for those. I hope to use my training in an effort to prevent deadly viruses that can spread and kill millions of animals and humans,” Yasuda says.

Kenneth Kemphues: Decision-Making and Fate in Basic Research ▼

One basic question has captivated Kenneth Kemphues, professor of molecular biology and genetics, for all of his 23 years at Cornell: How does an embryo, which starts out as a single cell, sort out its head from its tail, its belly from its back? Or, put more scientifically, how is cell polarity established?

“What I find just fascinating,” he says, “is that the [single-celled] embryo reorganizes itself after fertilization so that one end is completely different from the other. As a consequence, when the cell divides, one daughter cell has an entirely different fate from the other.”

Kemphues has figured out part of the process by studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a favorite model organism of basic geneticists. His lab has discovered six partitioningdefective, or PAR, genes, which he dubbed PAR-1 through PAR-6.

He found that, before a single-celled embryo divides, two of the PAR proteins concentrate in what will be the future posterior, and another two, plus another protein, settle in what will be the anterior. “If you get rid of any one of these proteins, the asymmetry doesn’t occur, and the embryo doesn’t live,” he observes.

“The exciting part of the whole story is that we didn’t discover something that was peculiar to this organism,” he says, “but discovered polarity proteins, which are conserved through evolution in all the animals that have been looked at.”

Kemphues’s discoveries have attracted the interest of many other researchers. Though it’s been exciting making all the discoveries in a critical area of biology himself, he is glad to have colleagues and competitors. “We’re making reasonably good progress, but I’m going to retire without having a complete answer to the question I started with,” he says with a smile.