PhD candidates, Sam Church and Bruno de Medeiros, Research Associate Seth Donoughe ('18), and Prof. Cassandra Extavour disprove an old hypothesis and prove a new one. The study published in Nature analyzed a large data set to challenge the untested assumptions about egg size in insects. For example, one popular assumption has been that there is some universal scaling law that means certain egg shapes can only exist at certain sizes....

At 45 pounds and just over two feet tall, adult European roe deer are much smaller than American deer and closer in size to a greyhound. And unlike their cousin species, red deer or elk, roe deer like to be solitary, spending most of their lives within a range of one square kilometer.  PhD student, Nathan Ranc (Paul Moorcroft lab) want to know the reason for this mystery. In the Alps of northern Italy, Nathan and colleagues are trying to build a model that explains the factors determining why particular deer choose to live where they do. His work with roe deer...

A collaboration between professors at Tokyo Tech and Yamagata University and Prof. Jim Hanken has identified a surprising factor that the amount of oxygen surrounding the embryo could have been crucial for the appearance of interdigital cell death in tetrapods during evolution. The study, published in Developmental Cell, looked to understand the role of environmental oxygen in the...

Congratulations to our 42 undergraduate Integrative Biology (IB) graduates!! Many also claimed prizes!

The Sophia Freund Prize (awarded to student(s) with best overall GPA) awarded to Sophie Westbrook (Hopi Hoekstra Lab). 

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Peacock spiders, known for their elaborate mating dances, use incredibly dark, “super black” patches on their body to enhance nearby colors. This makes colors look impossibly bright, or even glowing, an optical illusion also used by birds-of-paradise.The spider evolved microlenses on its body surface, which manipulate light in the same way human-made materials do.

PhD Student, Dakota McCoy (David Haig Lab) documents a remarkable convergence of form, between nature and engineering, and function, between two groups of highly ornate, sexually selected animals,...

Prof. L. Mahadevan and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences researchers have developed a new model to describe how bacteria spread in different forms. The study, published in the open-access journal, eLife, combines mechanics, hydrodynamics and transport to describe the dynamics of growth and formation of thin bacterial swarms and biofilms; revealing the spread in both forms of microbial community are limited by the constraints of water and...

Congratulations to Rewan Abdelwahab, IB concentrator in OEB, presented the Spirit of Harvard College Award by the Dean of Students Office. Rewan is one of three students to receive the award for showing a commitment to the ideals articulated in the Mission of Harvard College over the past academic year. The award recognizes significant campus leadership contributions to integrate the intellectual, social, and...

Species from widely divergent taxa can experience similar changes in traits. What underlying genetic drivers cause these parallel changes remains an open question. Scott Edwards, Tim Sackton (Director of Bioinformatics and former Postdoc) and PhD student Phil Grayson used a new method developed by collaborators in the Harvard Statistics Department to look across groups of birds that have repeatedly lost flight. The team showed there is convergence in the regulatory regions associated with genes related to flight, but not within the protein coding regions.

In the...

Congratulations to Dan Hartl, awarded the 2019 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal by the Genetics Society of America!

In a study in the March 15 issue of Science Magazine, Mansi Srivastava and lab members Andrew Gehrke, Emily Neverett, Yi-Jyun Luo, Lorenzo Ricci (Postdocs) and Ryan Hulett (PhD student) shed light on how some animals have the amazing ability to regenerate and uncovered a number of DNA switches that appear to control genes for whole-body regeneration.

The team used three-...