Category: Faculty & Staff

Research Published on Alzheimer’s Molecules

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Biology professors Jim Langeland ’86 and Blaine Moore join one K student and three K alumni as authors of an important paper that will soon be published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. The co-authors are Nathalie Botezatu ’14, Maddie Gillentine ’13, Ashley (Boehmke) Benson ’08, and Kyle Wilson ’08. All were (or are) biology majors at K, and in the case of some, the scientific work—which describes the evolution of key molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease—was part of a Senior Individualized Project (SIP). The work is groundbreaking in at least two ways. First, it approaches Alzheimer’s disease from an evolutionary perspective. And second, it illustrates a particular niche approach to research that the scientific environment at K is well positioned to pull off.

“The experiments that culminated in this paper began in 2007 with the SIP work of Benson and Wilson,” says Langeland. “The six-year duration shows that science can take a long time to come to fruition.” That duration derives, in part, from the complementary expertise of the two collaborating labs—Langeland’s expertise in gene evolution and Moore’s background in Alzheimer’s disease research and experience with cellular expression of proteins.  According to Langeland, for most of the larger labs the exigency of understanding Alzheimer’s in order to development treatments for it may not favor such an extended timeline or evolutionary approach. Indeed, Moore says, “Most researchers in the Alzheimer’s field are exclusively focused on inhibiting the production of protein fragments that have been linked to the progression of the disease. One of the exciting aspects of this project was the chance to take a broader view of the proteins involved in the disease process.”

A broader view allows for unique approaches (suggesting that time and creativity are the two pillars of the particular niche approach to research for which K is so well-equipped). Six years ago Langeland decided to investigate the evolution of two molecules associated with Alzheimer’s—APP and BACE. BACE acts like a scissors to cut (or cleave) APP. The excess accumulation of one of the “cut pieces” (a.k.a. products or substrates, this particular one known as A-Beta) is linked to the development of the disease. Benson and Wilson sought answers to how far back on the evolutionary tree of life these molecules could be found. Turns out that APP is nearly a billion years old. BACE (and its cleavage effect) is much younger, about 500 million years old. Just down the hall, Moore’s lab had been studying the regulation of enzymes that produce A-Beta, and had well-developed systems for expressing Alzheimer’s proteins and analyzing cleavage products. Put the two together and you have a unique project that would have been unlikely at a larger institution or medical school.

The principle of natural selection suggests that BACE’s action on APP is vital to life in ways we don’t yet understand, according to Langeland. The A-Beta substrate may be some kind of mistake that natural selection is unable to “correct” because Alzheimer’s expresses so late in human lifetimes, usually long after reproductive success has been achieved. Moore says, “It’s essentially a wrong place, wrong time phenomenon. The APP substrate evolves the A-Beta motif, then comes in cellular contact with preexisting BACE. The result is a devastating disease process that is most likely an accidental by-product of some normal, as yet unknown, cellular process.”

Moore and his lab (including Gillentine and Botezatu) conducted an elegant experiment to confirm the importance of the BACE molecule. They expressed the BACE molecule from an organism—in this case a primitive marine dweller called amphioxus—that diverged from the human evolutionary branch some 750 million years ago. Amphioxus has no A-Beta. Then, Moore’s group discovered that amphioxus BACE nevertheless acts as a scissors to the human APP molecule. The result adds evidence to the biological importance (albeit unknown) of BACE’s cleaving action.

According to Langeland, an evolutionary approach to diseases may suggest molecular targets for treatment intervention, and, just as important, the limitation of a non-nuanced approach to potential targets.

The paper is titled “Asynchronous Evolutionary Origins of A-Beta and BACE-1.” The work was supported, in part, by a Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Directions Initiative Grant, a program that supports professional growth of mid-career liberal arts faculty, with particular emphasis on projects outside traditional boundaries.

Winter Term Ethnic Studies

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Dr. Reid Gómez, the Melon Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, has designed a series of winter term programs and web pages and prompts as a collective resource for a campus-wide conversations on the matter of ethnic studies. For many of these conversations the general public is welcome as well. The series begins with a lecture (Thursday, January 9) titled “What is Ethnic Studies?”  Gómez will give the lecture twice–at 4:10 PM and at 7 PM–in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room.

“Conversations about ethnic studies at K have been taking place since 1968,” says Gómez. “Recently a renewed movement and rising range of voices reflect the desire for a further exchange of ideas.”

Features on the ethnic studies website will serve to deepen that exchange. The features include a bookshelf, several faculty discussions, a blog for the K community, a calendar of events (programs occur every week of the 10-week term), and a series of conversations. For the latter, the campus community will be called to join several invited participants to discuss a particular theme, reading, or video prompt. Gómez will moderate. “We will sit in concentric circles (one inside, and the other outside),” says Gómez.  “The participants will take their place in the center, and we will leave several chairs open, should someone catch the spirit and chose to formally join the conversation. People may enter and exit the conversation at will, and they may choose to participate in silence, while listening. Everyone in the outside circle will have the opportunity to listen in.  Near the end, we will turn the circles inside out for the opportunity to debrief, and review the places our conversation lead us.  Opportunities for follow-up conversations will take place on the ethnic studies blog.”

“A Year of Food in Kalamazoo” for Only $12!

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2014 "A Year of Food in Kalamazoo" calendar
“A Year of Food in Kalamazoo” wall calendar is only $12 and only at the People’s Food Coop in Kalamazoo!

A group of K students has a last-minute gift idea for you that will keep on giving throughout 2014: “A Year of Food in Kalamazoo” wall calendar. This partner project between K’s First-Year Seminar “Cultivating Community” and the People’s Food Co-op in Kalamazoo is colorful, useful, and full of recipes, profiles of local food entrepreneurs, and great ideas that will feed your inner foodie’s soul for a whole year. It’s only $12 and will encourage the efforts of 17 K students and their professor, Amelia Katanski. Available from the People’s Food Coop, 507 Harrison St. in Kalamazoo. Happy New Year, indeed!

Face Time

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We love faces; our lives depend on it from an early age. And a close-up on a face is one of the most notable differences between the experience of a movie and the experience of live theater. When we choose to see a film instead of a play it may be, in part, because were drawn to the human face. In her latest installment of her Psychology Today blog (What Shapes Film?) Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan explores what attracts us to cinematic face time. Her article is aptly titled “3 Reasons Why We’re Drawn to Faces in Film.” Maybe it should be four reasons, because music plays a big role as well. It’s a fascinating read, and Tan demonstrates her points with faces from some pretty famous films, including Amelie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Saving Private Ryan, and Toy Story 2, among others. Of particular interest is how facial close-ups make us, the audience, both mirror and blank-canvas-and-painter, depending on a face’s intensity or nuance, respectively.

Hands-On HOPES

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Regina_Stevens-TrussRegina Stevens-Truss, the Kurt D. Kaufman Associate Professor of Chemistry has written an article updating an idea of hers and the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: the HOPES Initiative. HOPES pairs teachers with working scientists so that together they could provide hands-on opportunities to students. “We didn’t anticipate the sweeping impact the program would have across the nation,” wrote Stevens-Truss in the update. The HOPES initiative has resulted in 27 partnerships in 22 cities across the U.S. and has affected the education of more than 3,600 fourth- through 12th-graders.

K Provost Mickey McDonald Supports Kalamazoo Communities in Schools “Promise Me” Campaign

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Six Promise Me Campaign participants
(From Left) KPS Superintendent Michael F. Rice, K Provost Michael McDonald, “Promise Me” Campaign Co-Chair and President of First National Bank of Michigan Larry Lueth, CIS National President Dan Cardinali, CIS of Kalamazoo Executive Director Pam Kingery, and WMU President John Dunn.

Kalamazoo College Provost Michael “Mickey” McDonald represented the College and delivered remarks at the recent Communities in Schools of Kalamazoo (CIS) Promise Me campaign public phase kickoff event. Mickey joined Kalamazoo Public Schools Superintendent Michael Rice, Kalamazoo Valley Community College President Marilyn Schlack, Western Michigan University President John Dunn, students, parents, and local leaders who lauded CIS for its effort to help remove the barriers between disadvantaged children and their K-12 success. CIS addresses the academic and basic developmental needs of students by connecting existing community resources to students at school. The Promise Me campaign is nearly halfway to its $4.5 million fundraising goal and is seeking the support of the greater Kalamazoo community in reaching it.

An Archaeology of Yearning

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Book cover for An Archaeology of YearningKalamazoo College Professor of English Bruce Mills’s fifth book, An Archaeology of Yearning, has been published by Etruscan Press. Using the metaphor of an archeological dig, Mills maps the artifacts of life as a father of a son with autism and as a boy himself growing up in Iowa. Of the book, Carolyn Kuebler, editor of the prestigious New England Review, writes: “This urgent and affecting memoir of parenthood is also a testimony to the way acts of imagination can lead us out of isolation and into communion with others, however tentative.” Ginger Strand ’87, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies and Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, states that Mills “has written a rare and grace-filled book, one as true to reality-bound family life as it is to the soaring speculative beauty of archaeology, history, and thought. We come away with a deeper understanding of what it is to be a parent, a family, and finally, a human being.” Information about the book and upcoming events, including a reading on Tuesday, November 12, 7-8 pm, at Chelsea (Michigan) Public Library can be found on Mills’s blog.

Bruce Mills appeared on WWMT-TV Ch. 3 on Sunday Nov. 24 to discuss his book.

Michigan Radio broadcast an interview with Prof. Mills on Jan 22. Listen here: http://michiganradio.org/post/one-michigan-familys-journey-autism

Saved Seven Times Before the Age of Five

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Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss ’78 will have her third volume of poems, Four-Legged Girl, published in 2015.

Her first collection was It Blows You Hollow, and her second, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry.

Last month Seuss was interviewed by Missouri Review intern Anne Barngrover for the Review’s Text Box anthology (October 15). It’s a fascinating read, much like a Di poem: “Four-Legged Girl is specifically concerned with embodiment, beauty, loss, addiction and desire,” says Seuss. “Maybe it is post-body, post-beauty, post-grief, post-addiction, post-desire. I think so. I believe it is located more outside the boundary of community than my other books; its imagination is more iconoclastic, arriving at ferocity, femaleness, freakishness, and solitude–which to me is poetry.”

The interview touches on the treatment of religion (“I tried to be Catholic about the same year as I got breast buds.”), female sexuality (“The four-legged girl’s lonely freakishness is a signal of her monstrous royalty.”), and the recurrence of the name “Mary” throughout her work (“…maybe the four-legged girl is named Mary. I think my notion of the goddess has gotten a lot racier. But in tandem with that raciness is an omnipresent grief.)” The reader also learns a great deal about the College’s resident writer’s writing process–“I have never been someone who writes daily….There is a window of opportunity in which I know all and see all from the poem’s point of view and language palette….Once the window closes, I’m lost. Out of that lostness, when it’s just me and the dog and the nameless stars, comes the next poem.”

Weeping Baby

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Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan wrote an article (“Why Does this Baby Weep when her Mother Sings?”) for Psychology Today that elucidates an infant’s actions in a You Tube video gone viral. The video shows an infant — Mary Lynne Leroux — emoting deeply to her mother’s singing. Tan suggests the infant’s reactions result from psychological phenomena called emotional contagion and emotional synchrony in combination with the bell-shaped melody of the song itself and just plain wonder. Of course, people (21 million views and counting) are responding more to the magic of the piece rather than its clinical explanation. And the latter in no way diminishes the former. To the question of whether her analysis made the video “any less magical,” Tan wrote, “In my view, it may be even more remarkable and even more compelling to think that what we are witnessing may not just be the power of the human voice and singing — but a window into how deeply and powerfully we are moved by the emotions of those around us, even in our earliest interactions.” It’s an intriguing video and article.

Kalamazoo College Professor Péter Érdi Earns Award from International Neural Networks Societies

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Peter Erdi among three accepting awards
Kalamazoo College Professor Peter Erdi (left), Plamen Angelov (Lancaster University), and Daniel Levine (University of Texas at Arlington) received Outstanding Service Awards at the 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. Photo by Wentao Guo.

Péter Érdi, K’s Henry R. Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies, served as the Program Chair for the 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), the premier international conference in the area of neural networks theory, analysis, and application. This year’s IJCNN was held in Dallas, Texas and was attended by more than 500 people.

Professor Érdi, who teaches in K’s departments of Physics and Psychology, was also one of three chairs of the Organizing Committee to receive the Outstanding Service Award from the International Neural Network Society and the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers Computational Intelligence Society, the two leading professional organizations for researchers working in neural networks.

He joined other big names in neural research who received awards at the conference, including Stephen Grossberg (Boston University), considered by many in the field to be the father/inventor of adaptive resonance theory; Terry Sejnowski  (University California at San Diego) who works on President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative, which is being compared to the Human Genome Project and the moon landing initiative; and Frank Lewis, a Distinguished Professor at University of Texas Arlington Research Institute who received the IEEE Pioneer in Neural Networks Award for his work in bringing together optimal and adaptive control.