In a paper published today in Nature, North Carolina State University genetics researchers team with scientists from across the globe to describe the new reference manual – the Drosophila melanogaster Reference Panel, or DGRP. Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds and Distinguished University Professor of Genetics and one of the paper’s lead authors, says that the reference panel contains 192 lines of fruit flies that differ enormously in their genetic variation but are identical within each line, along with their genetic sequence data.

These resources are publicly available to researchers studying so-called quantitative traits, or characteristics that vary and are influenced by multiple genes – think of traits like aggression or sensitivity to alcohol. Mackay expects the reference panel will benefit researchers studying everything from animal evolution to animal breeding to fly models of disease.

Environmental conditions also affect quantitative traits. But studying the variations of these different characteristics, or phenotypes, of inbred fruit flies under controlled conditions, Mackay says, can greatly aid efforts to unlock the secrets of quantitative traits.

“Each fly line in the reference panel is essentially genetically identical, but each line is also a different sample of genetic variation among the population,” Mackay says. “So the lines can be shared among the research community to allow researchers to measure traits of interest.”

The Nature paper showed that, in general, many genes were associated with three quantitative traits studied in fruit flies – resistance to starvation stress, chill coma recovery time and startle response – and that the effects of these genes were quite large.

“Until now, we had the information necessary to understand what makes a fruit fly different from, say, a mosquito,” Mackay says. “Now we understand the genetic differences responsible for individual variation, or why one strain of flies lives longer or is more aggressive than another strain.”

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Human Genome Research Institute and the NVIDIA Foundation’s “Compute the Cure” program. Dr. Eric Stone, associate professor of genetics at NC State, is also a lead author of the paper, along with colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain.

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Cyrano is a 10-year-old tabby cat who was treated for bone cancer last year and is now in total remission. However, the disease and treatment weakened the bone in his affected back leg and Cyrano’s knee

Cyrano's implant is about the same size as a tube of lip balm. Image courtesy of Greg van der Meulen, BioMedtrix, LLC

deteriorated as a result. His owner, Sandy Lerner, felt that amputation would negatively affect the cat’s quality of life, and her search for other options brought them both to NC State and the team of orthopedic surgeon Dr. Denis Marcellin-Little and industrial and systems engineer Dr. Ola Harrysson.

Marcellin-Little and Harrysson are pioneers in osseointegration, a process that fuses a prosthetic limb with an animal’s (or human’s) bones. The NC State team, in collaboration with veterinarians and engineers from around the U.S. and abroad, will provide Cyrano with the first ever custom-made, osseointegrated feline knee replacement.

“Although total knee replacements in dogs are increasingly common, a cat poses some additional challenges, particularly regarding the size of the implant,” Marcellin-Little says. “Additionally, Cyrano’s existing leg bones were weakened by the cancer, so we must take care to be sure that the implant does not place undue stress on the remaining bone.”

If all goes well, Cyrano should be back to mousing at the family farm in about three months.

Cyrano’s case is unique, but Marcellin-Little hopes that this surgery will pave the way toward making feline knee replacements more commonly available. “This collaboration between NC State’s College of Veterinary Medicine,  College of Engineering, and outside implant designers and manufacturers allows us to design and make implants that we could only dream of, in the past. I am sure that this technology will help other patients with tumors, in the future.”

North Carolina State University biomedical engineers Dr. Gregory Sawicki and Dr. Dominic Farris have discovered why: At 2 meters per second, running makes better use of an important calf muscle than walking, and therefore is a much more efficient use of the muscle’s – and the body’s – energy.

Published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the results stem from a first-of-its-kind study combining ultrasound imaging, high-speed motion-capture techniques and a force-measuring treadmill to examine a key calf muscle and how it behaves when people walk and run.

The study used ultrasound imaging in a unique way: A small ultrasound probe fastened to the back of the leg showed in real time the adjustments made by the muscle as study subjects walked and ran at various speeds.

The high-speed images revealed that the medial gastrocnemius muscle, a major calf muscle that attaches to the Achilles tendon, can be likened to a “clutch” that engages early in the stride, holding one end of the tendon while the body’s energy is transferred to stretch it. Later, the Achilles – the long, elastic tendon that runs down the back of the lower leg – springs into action by releasing the stored energy in a rapid recoil to help move you.

The study showed that the muscle “speeds up,” or changes its length more and more rapidly as people walk faster and faster, but in doing so provides less and less power. Working harder and providing less power means less overall muscle efficiency.

When people break into a run at about 2 meters per second, however, the study showed that the muscle “slows down,” or changes its length more slowly, providing more power while working less rigorously, thereby increasing its efficiency.

“The ultrasound imaging technique allows you to separate out the movement of the muscles in the lower leg and has not been used before in this context,” Farris says.

The finding sheds light on why speed walking is generally confined to the Olympics: muscles must work too inefficiently to speed walk, so the body turns to running in order to increase efficiency and comfort, and to conserve energy.

“The muscle can’t catch up to the speed of the gait as you walk faster and faster,” Sawicki says. “But when you shift the gait and transition from a walk to a run, that same muscle becomes almost static and doesn’t seem to change its behavior very much as you run faster and faster, although we didn’t test the muscle at sprinting rates.”

The research could help inform the best ways of building assistive or prosthetic devices for humans, or help strength and conditioning professionals assist people who have had spinal-cord injury or a stroke, Sawicki and Farris say.

The researchers are part of NC State’s Human PoWeR (Physiology of Wearable Robotics) Lab, directed by Sawicki. The joint Department of Biomedical Engineering is part of NC State’s College of Engineering and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine.

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Superbugs From Swine: Antibiotics are frequently used on commercial hog farms not only to fight disease, but also to help pigs gain weight faster. Research from NC State found the common pests that live on these farms acquire antibiotic-resistant bacteria and have the potential to spread these bacteria throughout the farm and to residential settings.

Supernova Solved: In 185 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded a bright “guest star” in the night sky. By the 1960s, astronomers figured out that the guest star was in fact a supernova, and identified the remains of the stellar explosion. And in 2011, a team of astrophysicists led by NC State researchers solved the mystery of what caused this explosion and why this particular remnant is so very large.

Soft Memory: NC State researchers developed a memory device that is as soft as Jell-O and functions well in wet environments – opening the door to a new generation of biocompatible electronic devices.

Predicting and Preventing Genocide: Researchers from NC State proposed a health-based approach to identifying groups at high risk of genocide, in a first-of-its-kind attempt to target international efforts to stop these mass killings before they start.

Helicopter Parents: Parental safety concerns may prevent children from getting good exercise, according to an NC State study that examined how families use neighborhood parks.

Superstreets: The so-called “superstreet” traffic design results in significantly faster travel times, and leads to a drastic reduction in automobile collisions and injuries, according to NC State researchers who conducted the largest-ever study of superstreets and their impacts.

Sniffing Out Lymphoma: Researchers at NC State are narrowing the search for genes involved in non-Hodgkin lymphoma – by turning dogs into humans (genomically speaking).

Self-Healing Sensors: NC State researchers have designed a sensor that can measure strain in structural materials and is capable of healing itself – an important advance for collecting data to help us make informed decisions about structural safety in the wake of earthquakes, explosions or other unexpected events.

Circadian Rhythm Linked To Skin Cancer: When you’re hit with that afternoon energy lull, don’t head outside to find some sunlight to brighten your day. An NC State study shows that the same circadian rhythm that saps your afternoon energy also appears to slow down some important cellular healing mechanisms – including one that repairs DNA damage in skin cells.

Removing Radioactive Contaminants: A combination of forest byproducts and crustacean shells may be the key to removing radioactive materials from drinking water, according to researchers from NC State.

Kidney Disease: Effects of a particularly devastating human kidney disease may be blunted by making a certain cellular protein receptor much less receptive, according to research by scientists at NC State and a number of French universities and hospitals.

LED Efficiency: Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are an increasingly popular technology for use in energy-efficient lighting. Researchers from NC State have developed a technique that reduces defects in the gallium nitride films used to create LEDs, making them more efficient.

Carbon and The Big Bang: As Star Trek is so fond of reminding us, we’re carbon-based life forms. But the event that jump-started the universe, the Big Bang, didn’t actually produce any carbon, so where the heck did it – and we – come from? An NC State researcher has helped create supercomputer simulations that demonstrate how carbon is produced in stars, proving an old theory correct.

Dog-Gone Good! A Prosthetic Canine Ankle: NC State researchers designed, developed and surgically implanted a customized prosthetic ankle for a Siberian husky. NC State is the only university in the world that can manufacture custom prosthetics for veterinary patients in house, thanks to the close collaboration between veterinarians and engineers.

Snakes Are Different From You and Me: Virgin motherhood by a copperhead snake. Sperm storage for more than five years by an eastern diamondback rattlesnake before fertilization and motherhood. NC State researchers are finding that reptile reproduction, to steal from Alice in Wonderland,  is getting curioser and curioser.

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Supernova remnant RCW 86 is much larger than it should be – in fact, if it could be seen in the sky, it would take up more space than our full moon.

“This supernova remnant got really big, really fast,” says Brian J. Williams, postdoctoral research scholar at NC State. “It’s two to three times bigger than we would expect for a supernova that was witnessed exploding nearly 2,000 years ago. Now, we’ve been able to finally pinpoint the cause.”

To do so, astronomers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to take infrared readings of  RCW 86. That data, as well as previous observational data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory, showed that the stellar explosion took place in a hollowed-out cavity, which allowed material expelled by the star to travel much faster and farther than it would have otherwise.

The infrared data were also used to confirm what triggered the explosion that brightened the skies in 185 A.D. According to the data, the event is a Type Ia supernova, which means that a star like our sun died relatively peacefully, shrinking into a dense star called a white dwarf. The white dwarf is thought to have later blown up in a supernova after siphoning matter, or fuel, from a nearby star.

“A white dwarf is like a smoking cinder from a burnt out fire,” says Williams. “If you pour gasoline on it, it will explode.”

Supernovae are often thought of as belonging to two main classes: Type Ia and core-collapse. The latter are the most powerful blasts, and are triggered when a massive star runs out of fuel and its core caves in. Unlike core-collapse supernovae, Type Ia always release about the same amount of energy, and, as a result, are used as standard candles to measure distances and the expansion rate of our universe.

Scientists had initially suspected that RCW 86 was the result of a core-collapse supernova, in which a massive star blew up into an empty bubble around it. Such cavities are common in core-collapse events, because massive stars tend to blow material away from them as they age, carving out the cavities. A cavity would also explain why the remains of RCW 86 are so big; when the explosion occurred, the expelled material would have traveled unimpeded by gas and dust, and thus reached great distances quickly.

But the problem was that other evidence pointed against a core-collapse supernova. X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton indicated that the object consisted of high amounts of iron, a telltale sign of a Type Ia blast. Type Ia supernovae involve white dwarfs, and it was not clear, until now, that white dwarfs could also blow bubbles around them before exploding as supernova.

The infrared observations from Spitzer and WISE allowed the team to measure the temperature of the dust making up the RCW 86 remnant (about minus 325 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 degrees Celsius). They then calculated how much gas must be present within the remnant to heat the dust to those temperatures. The results point to a low-density environment for much of the life of the remnant, and show, for the first time, that Type Ia supernova can occur with cavities.

That’s what’s so exciting about the discovery, Williams says. “Type Ia supernovae are seen all the time, and supernovae exploding into cavities are seen all the time, but a Type Ia supernova exploding into a cavity has only been theorized before, and never seen until now.”

Williams’ findings appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

NC State is part of the Southeast Partnership for Integrated Biomass Supply Systems, a collaboration of several universities and industry partners who will work on all aspects of the “biofuels pipeline” between the forests where the trees – the biomass feedstock – are grown and the “biorefineries” where the biofuels are produced. The partnership is funded for five years with a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The research includes understanding the challenges of storing and transporting the biomass, and studying new developments in the production of biofuels. It also includes developing and deploying measures of the environmental and economic impacts of producing biofuel, says Dr. Steve Kelley, professor and head of NC State’s Department of Forest Biomaterials and the principal investigator for the NC State portion of the grant. He adds that the entire biofuel production process must be efficient, scalable and sustainable.

“The Southeast is a veritable ‘wood basket’ that can produce much of the feedstock that shows great promise for production of biofuels,” Kelley says. “Besides the obvious need for energy security, this project will develop economic and environmental measures that can inform the public discussion at the community level, and allow individual communities to evaluate their prospects for job creation and landowner income. We want to create the infrastructure capable of providing the backbone for increased biofuel capacity.”

The partnership will also study the best ways of informing and training forest landowners and local businesses on the “hows” and “whys” of producing, harvesting and transporting different varieties of biofuel feedstock.

The partnership grant was one of five USDA-NIFA grants recently announced – totaling more than $136 million – aimed at developing regional, renewable energy markets, generating rural jobs and reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Joining Kelley as investigators on the grant are Drs. Robert Bardon, Vincent Chiang, Sudipta Dasmohapatra, Barry Goldfarb, Fikret Isik, Hasan Jameel, Steve McKeand, Dan Robison, Sunkyu Park, Jose Stape, Richard Venditti and Ross Whetten. They are all faculty members in NC State’s College of Natural Resources.

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Those are the results of a painstaking study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University and colleagues in Belgium who are trying to discover what happens in the genes and brains of hyper-aggressive flies and how that differs from what takes place in more passive fly cousins.

Hyper-aggressive fruit flies box, albeit without the gloves. Aggressive flies have smaller brain portions and aren't necessarily soothed by mood-altering drugs.

Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished University Professor of Genetics and a co-lead author of a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that the findings in the fruit fly could one day lead to helping humans – think of Alzheimer’s patients who suddenly become more aggressive – by providing a framework of how complex gene interactions affect behavior. Fruit flies are model organisms for studying genes and traits like aggression.

In the study, the researchers showed that making changes, or mutations, to a handful of genes made some passive flies aggressive and made some aggressive flies really aggressive. They also showed the effects of mating flies with different mutations to see which mutant combinations had larger effects on aggression.

The researchers also showed that certain portions of the fly brain – the so-called mushroom bodies, which affect locomotion, experience and memory – were smaller in the hyper-aggressive flies.

The study also showed that calming did not necessarily come through chemistry, as doses of lithium soothed some but not all of the aggressive flies. These mixed results were also evident when flies were given two other types of calming drugs.

“This study shows that these brain networks are not simple, and that you can’t look at just one gene at a time,” says study co-author Dr. Robert Anholt, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Biology at NC State.

The researchers measured aggression by watching for fly actions that include, in order from less aggressive to more aggressive: chasing other flies; puffing up their wings in a “wing threat” position; kicking other flies; and, for the roughest flies, standing on their back legs and boxing other flies with front legs.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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Genocide, or the willful attempt to exterminate a specific population, is a violation of international law. In recent years, international discussion of genocide has focused in part on finding ways to identify populations at risk in order to prevent a problem before it starts.

New approach may help international community prevent the horror of genocide.

Some risk factors have already been identified, such as severe state oppression of a group or a regional history of genocide. Now researchers are offering a new risk factor for consideration: a population’s health and its track record of prenatal care.

“This is a data-driven approach that we developed by analyzing the remains of genocide victims. There can be no confusion or claims of inaccurate reporting from third parties. The bodies of the victims speak for themselves,” says Dr. Ann Ross, professor of anthropology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research and proposed risk factor. This effort marks the first time researchers have used skeletal analysis to assess the overarching health of genocide victims before their murder.

Ross and her co-author, former NC State graduate student Ashley Maxwell, began by analyzing remains of Bosnian Muslims from the Srebrenica massacre – where 8,000 men and boys were killed in 1995. Ross is a forensic anthropologist and worked extensively in the Balkans during the late 1990s to help identify the remains of genocide victims.

The researchers found that the Srebrenica victims had an unusually high frequency of malnutrition, poor health and inadequate prenatal care. For example, the victims had a high rate of spina bifida, which is directly related to poor nutrition and prenatal care.

“These conditions are good indicators of genocide risk because they illustrate the population’s marginalized status,” Ross says.

The researchers also examined epidemiological data from the World Health Organization on the general health of refugees from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Those data were consistent with the forensic assessment of the Srebrenica victims.

“This gives politicians and international bodies another tool that can be used to identify – and protect – populations facing genocide,” Ross says. “We need to prevent these mass murders, not sit on our hands wondering when to take action.”

The paper, “Epidemiology of Genocide: An Example from the Former Yugoslavia,” will be published in the fall issue of Forensic Science Policy and Management.

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Here’s the proof:

> When the state’s textiles industry declined in the face of cutthroat global competition, shedding thousands of jobs, NC State launched the Nonwovens Institute, a research and development partnership with industry leaders that gave birth to the advanced textiles industry in North Carolina.

Textile worker Benny Best has a job thanks to NC State's Industrial Extension Service.

> Our pioneering Industrial Extension Service, established in 1955, helps businesses compete and win by increasing their efficiency, productivity, quality and—as a result—profits. The service has generated more than $1 billion in direct gains to the state over the past five years.

> The FREEDM Center, funded by the National Science Foundation, is working to create the next-generation power grid. The center’s researchers have made significant advances toward developing new transformers, better communications systems and more efficient electric-vehicle batteries.

> The Golden LEAF Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center at NC State gives students advanced hands-on training using the same facilities and equipment found in the world’s leading biotech companies.

> Our Institute for Advanced Analytics is a national model for education in statistical analysis.  Graduates have a more than 98 percent placement rate and an average entering salary of  $83,000.

Top Programs

Programs like these have propelled NC State to the top ranks of research universities nationwide. Our veterinary medicine program is ranked third in the nation and we have the fourth largest engineering program in the country.

As a land-grant university with a commitment to serving the state, we offer one of the best values in higher education, placing third among the public universities surveyed by U.S. News & World Report this year.

Centennial Campus, a national model for university-based research parks since its creation in 1984, was named the world’s top research park by the Association of University Research Parks in 2007.

It’s no wonder the Wall Street Journal said corporate recruiters ranked NC State among the best places to find job candidates.

Casey Reynolds, an NC State graduate student in the Department of Crop Science, set out to discover why this is so. It has to do with photosynthesis, but not in the way you might think.

Reynolds and crop scientist Dr. Grady Miller are currently testing all of the colors used by ACC schools – and other regional schools like East Carolina University and the University of South Carolina – to determine how each team’s colors affect turfgrass photosynthesis.

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