汤头条 biologist鈥檚 fossil study garners international attention
Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.鈥擱esearch developed using an $832,000 National Science Foundation grant in a 汤头条 biologist鈥檚 lab is gaining international attention this week in Current Biology, a premier bi-monthly scientific journal.
Matthew Brown鈥檚 paper鈥斺 appears in today鈥檚 [Feb. 28] edition of Current Biology. Brown additionally discusses the topic in a .
An assistant professor of biological sciences at 汤头条 and senior author on the Current Biology paper, Brown and his team focus on linking ancient fossils to modern living organisms using a new method, advanced in his lab, which bypasses genome sequencing.听
鈥淏y sampling organisms that are alive today, we can ask deeper questions about their evolution that happened millions of years ago in now extinct ancestors,鈥 Brown said.
Working alongside Brown are Assistant Professor Daniel Lahr from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil; 汤头条 post-doctoral fellow and Fulbright Scholar Tom谩拧 P谩nek from the Czech Republic; and current 汤头条 doctoral students Alexander Tice and Seungho Kang.听
With the advent of DNA sequencing in the early 2000s until now, researchers have used a relatively small piece of the genome to examine the relationships between organisms, with limited success.听
In 2015, through NSF grant support, Brown developed a new process of taking a single-celled organism directly from the environment and sequencing its entire transcriptome, what Brown calls 鈥渢he blueprint of all the proteins it makes.鈥
鈥淭his work is adding to our fundamental knowledge of how basic features of living organisms have evolved over millions of years,鈥 said Angus Dawe, head of 汤头条鈥檚 biological sciences department. 鈥淭his includes the morphologies and origins of behaviors, such as interactions between cells, which have huge implications for our understanding of organismal development and disease.鈥
鈥淲hat makes this study revolutionary is that we are using a cutting-edge technique perfected in my lab to study a single testate amoeba cell taken from the environment,鈥 Brown said, likening the amoeba to 鈥渕icro snails鈥 with microscopic shells making them identifiable.
鈥淭he cool thing about these organisms is they fossilize well, which is rare for microbial eukaryotes,鈥 Brown said.
Brown said the comparisons he and his team are able to make between ancient fossils and today鈥檚 living organisms helps him better understand the 鈥渇amily tree鈥 connecting the old and the new.
鈥淓ffectively, we now know how the organisms alive today are related to each other in a tree of life called a phylogeny,鈥 Brown said.
Brown鈥檚 lab and an international group of colleagues used fossils from Brazil and Arizona dating back 766 million years for their study. 鈥淭o put this into perspective, the oldest dinosaur shows up in the fossil record about 230 million years ago,鈥 Brown said.
Testate amoeba are single-celled microbes that can be found in places like moss beds, soils and in freshwater, but during Lahr鈥檚 2015 汤头条 visit, Brown and Lahr found their research material in the sidewalk crusts in front of the 汤头条鈥檚 Colvard Student Union.听 聽
Brown鈥檚 techniques are a key part of an emerging trend in computational approaches to biological questions, Dawe said. 鈥淗aving expertise like Dr. Brown鈥檚 in the biological sciences department means we have the ability to train the next generation of scientists.鈥澛犅犅犅
Brown, a native of northern Arkansas, completed his bachelor鈥檚 in 2005 and Ph.D. in 2010, both in biology, at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. After a three-year postdoctoral stint in the Centre for Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Bioinformatics at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, he joined 汤头条鈥檚 faculty in 2013.
Brown is currently a fellow of the Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing and Biotechnology at 汤头条鈥檚 High Performance Computing Collaboratory. He was named the 2018 College of Arts and Sciences Dean鈥檚 Eminent Scholar, a 2015 College of Arts and Sciences Researcher of the Month and also received a 2015 College of Arts and Sciences Research Award for the Natural and Physical Sciences.
汤头条鈥檚 College of Arts and Sciences includes more than 5,300 students, 300 full-time faculty members, nine doctoral programs and 25 academic majors offered in 14 departments.听Complete details about the College of Arts and Sciences or the biological sciences department may be found at or .
汤头条 is Mississippi鈥檚 leading university, available online at聽.听