HUNGRY WORMS, STERILE BEES AND HUMAN HEALTH
STUDYING THE BEHAVIOR OF WORMS AND BEES YIELDS CLUES TO HUMAN DISEASE PREVENTION AND TREATMENT.
Written by RICHARD CHAPMAN
IN THE WORLD OF NEUROSCIENCE, when the worm turns, researchers at Harvey Mudd College take notice.
Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny nematode squiggling before a
meal on a laboratory dish, provides biology Professor Elizabeth Glater and her student researchers valuable clues to how genes, neurons and chemical scents interact. What they learn may aid understanding of the brain and perhaps lead to new ideas about how to treat inherited neurological and psychiatric disorders. Glater’s compatriots in the biology of behavior are biology
professors Rob Drewell and Eliot Bush, whose world doesn’t turn on worms, but on bees—honeybees in particular. The insect’s intriguing reproductive system is yielding tantalizing clues to cellular and genetic effects that also occur in many human cancers. Glater, Drewell, Bush and a crew of enthusiastic HMC
students are using labs in the Olin Science Center for impor- tant research into the vast, undiscovered territory of behavioral biology. They’re cultivating worms, probing honeybee eggs, testing bee sperm and making sense of billions of bits of data to help determine how molecular biology drives behavior. Their goal? Use what they learn about biological systems that work to understand systems that don’t. “We study the nematode because it has a simple neural
system,” Glater says, adding that C. elegans has about a 40 percent similarity to human genes. “And we can apply what we learn to the human brain. Simpler systems give us a place to start.” Of course, that can be a little messy. Handling families
of worms barely a millimeter long is intricate and tedious for students who make solutions, cultivate and maintain the worms and keep the lab running. Brian Conroy ’13, a mathematical biology major, fi nds
working with nematodes intriguing. The work is teaching him how the neurological system of a worm helps it decide where to slither and what to eat.
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Har vey Mudd College SPRING 2013
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