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CSUN Biologists returned from Spring Break this week to a full mid-semester schedule, from exams and project deadlines to field trips, and a continuing heat wave that has March feeling more like August.
The Office of Undergraduate Research is still taking applications for the SUNRISE summer research program, which closes March 30.
The Biology Colloquium seminar series continues this week with CSUN Biology alumna Bianca Chavez, now a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Chavez is studying the structure and function of molecules that interact with telomeres, the stretches of repetitive sequence that “cap off” the ends of chromosomes. Her talk, sponsored by U-RISE, will be titled, “Telomeres consist of thousands of TTAGGG repeats and function as protective caps at chromosome ends”. Colloquium seminars are held this semester at 2:30pm in Chaparral Hall room 5125.
Click through for more of what’s going on across the Biology Department:
A skeleton crew slows coral reef recovery from bleaching, Edmunds Lab finds
Coral reefs can recover from bleaching events, but that recovery may be slowed or prevented by the aftermath of the bleaching — dead coral skeletons. That’s the finding of a study let by Marine Biology research technician Kathryn Scafidi and Prof Peter Edmunds, published earlier this month in PLOS ONE. Scafidi, Edmunds, and collaborators at the Mo’orea Long-Term Ecological Research site surveyed reefs around Mo’orea that suffered big losses in a 2019 bleaching event. They found that, years after the bleaching event, coral had failed to return in many places because skeletons of bleached coral provided a habitat for algae, and that algae prevented new coral colonies from establishing.
The full study is available Open Access on the journal website, and you can read news coverage of the results on Mirage News.