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Yat Fai (Michael) Yuen, a PhD student from Hong Kong, walked out of Swope one July evening and was intrigued by the sight of Eel Pond hidden in mist. “I went back to my room and got my camera. When I got back the mist had gone — it became suddenly so clear. And I took the picture,” he says. Yuen worked this summer in Rowe Laboratory with Prof. Andrew Miller of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Miller directs the Joint Universities Summer Teaching Laboratory (JUSTL), a program that brings promising young Hong Kong scientists to the MBL for summer research.

Eel Pond. Photo by Yat Fai Yuen

By Matt Person

If this photo suggests someone who has been far away and returned to report on his explorations, then it accurately depicts MBL scientist Paul Colinvaux’s informal lecture in the last of the MBLWHOI Library’s Summer Salon series. Reading from his book, Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator (2008, Yale University Press), Colinvaux gave a “you are there” sense of the exciting discoveries he made during his long career, which included climate research revelations during a search for lakes on cloud-shrouded Galapagos Island mountaintops; trekking deep into the Amazon for further climate studies; and recounting his earliest climate research in the Alaska wilderness.

“This is a memoir of a life in science. It is a story of exploring,” writes Colinvaux in a synopsis to his book. “It is a story of a great hypothesis [the refuge hypothesis] that grew into a scientific paradigm of our times. It explores the Amazon, the ice age, and climate change. … It is a tale of when evolutionary ecology came of age, to seek causes for the diversity of living things. … It tells of the power of paradigms to control the thoughts of men and of a struggle to remove an Amazon paradigm whose consequence was mischievous.”

Paul Colinvaux speaks at the MBLWHOI Library's Summer Salon series. Photo by Matt Person

By Julia Darcey

Perhaps the only way to fully appreciate Woods Hole’s blue ponds and long points is from the air. Peter Mangiafico, scientific informatics project leader for the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), recently got his pilot’s license and has been treating friends and family to some magnificent views during flights in a rental Cessna.

From left: Anthony Goddard, uBio lead developer & systems administrator; David Shorthouse, EOL scientific informatics project leader; and Mangiafico in the pilot's seat. Photo by Anthony Goddard

Mangiafico’s wife, Karen Casciotti, who is an associate scientist in Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry at WHOI, captured this beautiful shot of Woods Hole, with Eel Pond at center, during another flight.

Photo by Karen Casciotti.

By Julia Darcey

The MBL is known for bringing scientists from separate institutions together for unique and productive collaborations. That was a big draw for husband and wife, Joseph D. Buxbaum, a molecular geneticist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Dorothy E. Grice, a child psychiatrist at Columbia University, who rarely get the chance to work side-by-side. Their joint work at the MBL bore fruit this month when a paper they wrote with lead author Yuji Kajiwara, also of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, was published online in Biological Psychiatry. The team found that SLITRK1, a neural protein linked to Tourette syndrome and OCD, has an important binding protein called 14-3-3 and must be phosphorylated to function. Knowing how SLITRK1 functions is the first step to understanding its role in brain development and in disorders like Tourette syndrome.

“Because we work at separate institutions, we rarely get to share time in the lab. Working together at the bench, where we each contribute from our own areas of expertise, is an important part of our collaboration. So the opportunity to really work closely together is here, at the MBL,” Buxbaum says. Grice knew first-hand that the MBL was the perfect place to collaborate on this project—she grew up in Woods Hole, where her mother was an MBL librarian and her father a scientist at WHOI. “I knew from growing up here,” she says, “that the MBL would provide a great scientific environment. And we knew that it would be a great setting for the molecular biology and functional studies we wanted to do.”

While some of the MBL courses have ended and students have re-dispersed, with promises to stay in touch, the Brown/MBL graduate students are looking forward to the academic year in Woods Hole. This photo of Brown/MBL student Anupriya (Priya) Dutta, who is pouring a gel in a Bay Paul Center lab at sunset, captures the long, light-filled days of August when the excitement of fall is still around the corner. Fellow Brown/MBL student Alex Valm took the photo of Dutta, who is working with MBL faculty member David Mark Welch on genome evolution of bdelloid rotifers.

Brown/MBL student Anupriya Dutta. Photo by Alex Valm

One of the coolest machines in an MBL course this summer—and the courses are famous for having absolutely the best laboratory instrumentation you can get—is a high-pressure freezer, on loan from Leica, in the Physiology course. With an impressive burst of steam, it instantly turns a tissue sample into a flash-frozen slab. Then, the sample can be sliced and observed in an electron microscope, its biological activity freeze-framed at that instant of time.

But what’s really cool is this machine is an offshoot of the “freeze slammer” that MBL Neurobiology course faculty Tom Reese and John Heuser built in the late 1970s. “We pioneered a different kind of freezing, called slam freezing, with the idea of stopping tissue action. We used a copper plate cooled with liquid helium, and we slammed a piece of tissue against it,” says Reese, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health who is now in his 35th year of teaching in the MBL Neurobiology course. Reese and Heuser were able to release synaptic vesicles from frog neurons and capture the event using the slam freezer. “No one had ever observed structure on a millisecond time scale before (this),” Reese says.

“It was a classic experiment,” says Erik Jorgensen of HHMI/University of Utah, a neurobiologist who is “frequently found at the MBL in the summer trying to pull off experiments that cannot be done anywhere else,” he says. Jorgensen has modified the Leica freezer to perform like the freeze slammer, so he can observe instantaneous synaptic events, as Reese and Heuser did. Jorgensen remembers seeing the old Reese-Heuser freeze slammer in the basement of Loeb Laboratory. “These old machines, you had to be an engineer to run them,” Reese remembers. “The new ones are so easy to use, you find it sitting there in the Physiology course for the students to try out!”

Visiting investigator Erik Jorgensen demonstrates the high-pressure freezer in the Physiology course, which takes a cue from the freeze slammer invented by Neurobiology faculty Tom Reese and John Heuser in the late 1970s. Photo by Tom Kleindinst