NEWS & EVENTS

November 2009

Congratulations!

Susana Domingues, a graduate student working at the Betran Lab, have been selected as a University Scholar at The University of Texas at Arlington. The University created this award to formally recognize the top one percent of the student body who exemplify academic excellence. Every April, as part of Academic Excellence Week, the University Scholars are presented at the President's Convocation for Academic Excellence.

September 2009

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA)

Associate Professor Esther Betran awarded $83,000.

Promotions

Assistant Professors Esther Betran, Cedric Feschotte and Mike Roner promoted to Associate Professors.

August 2009

GBG's researcher awarded NIH grant

Assistant Professor Elena de la Casa Esperon has been awarded a NIH grant. The project “An interdiscipilinary program for systems genomics of complex behaviors”, submitted in response to a solicitation for Centers of Excellence in Genomics Science (P50). This project is supported with ARRA funds for the first two years ($5,800,000 total costs, $164,450 total costs for Dr. de la Casa Esperon's subcontract) beginning on September 1st 2009.

June 2009

Microbiologist will sequence termite genome

Dr. Jorge Rodrigues has been selected for a highly competitive genome sequencing project by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. Rodrigues will sequence the genome of Verrucomicrobium spinosum strain TAV2, a microorganism isolated from a termite's hindgut as part of an effort to identify solutions to climate change.

March 2009

UT Arlington biologist helps land $2 million grant

UT Arlington biologist Jeff Demuth and biologist Mike Wade of Indiana University Bloomington will receive $2 million to study speciation of the grain pest Tribolium castaneum or the red flour beetle. The project will investigate why individuals from populations in different parts of the world often do not produce healthy, flour-chomping offspring when brought together in the laboratory.

PLoS Genetics, a journal of the Public Library of Science, published research that showed a retrovirus related to HIV became stably integrated into the genome of several lemurs around 4.2 million years ago. The research, led by Dr. Cédric Feschotte, an assistant professor of biology, also was reported in Lab Spaces, Medical News Today and Science Daily. UT Arlington postdoctoral associate Clement Gilbert and undergraduate David Maxfield co-authored the paper, along with Dr. Steven Goodman from the Field Museum in Chicago.

February 2009

Darwin Day Celebration at UTA. | Download the program |

January 2009

Assistant Professor Cedric Feschotte is one of the invited speakers at the Second Conference on the Genomic Impact of Eukaryotic Transposable Elements, which will take place on Feb 6-10 at Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, CA. http://www.girinst.org/conference/Asilomar-2009/index.html

The GBG website had 16,265 pageviews from 86 countries in 2008.

Dr. Maeli Melotto's review, “Role of Stomata in Plant Innate Immunity and Foliar Bacterial Diseases” published in the Annual Review of Phytopathology in September 2008, has been very “popular”. During its short life (4 months), it was ranked among the 20 article most downloaded from the ARP web site: 753 times! (http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/action/showMostReadArticles?topArticlesType=recent&journalCode=phyto) And the article abstract has been accessed over 1500 times.