uf explore magazine spring 2013

Experimental PaletteThe Intersection of Art & Science

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Dr. Bernie Machen President

Dr. David Norton Vice President for Research

Board of TrusteesCheri Brodeur, Gainesville C. David Brown II, OrlandoSusan Cameron, Fort Lauderdale Christopher Corr, Lake Lure, NC Marshall McAllister Criser III, MiamiCharles B. Edwards, Fort Myers Michael Heekin, Sandy Springs, GA Carolyn K. Roberts, OcalaJuliet M. Roulhac, PlantationSteven M. Scott, Boca RatonDavid M. Thomas, WindermereJose Antonio Villamil IV, Gainesville

Explore is published by the UF Office of Research. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the university. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by the University of Florida.© 2013 University of Florida. explore.research.ufl.edu

Editor: Joseph M. Kays [email protected]

Art Director: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger

Design and Illustration: Katherine Kinsley-Momberger Paul Messal Nancy Schreck

Writer:Cindy Spence

Copy Editor:Patricia B. McGhee

Printing: StorterChilds Printing, Gainesville

Member of the University Research Magazine Associationwww.urma.org

Spring 2013, Vol. 18, No. 1

Saving Cedar Key

A historic fishing

village is now

Florida’s clam

capital.

Working Against TimeUF researchers

work to give

muscular dystrophy

patients longer,

fuller lives.

About the CoverEngineering Professor Tim Davis says people don’t need to understand the complex mathematics behind sparse matrices like this one to appreciate their artistic beauty.

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Citrus Greening

UF researchers are

taking a three-pronged

approach to fighting a

potentially devastating

citrus disease.

Experimental PaletteUF scientists and artists are

blending their unique talents to

mutual benefit.

5Research News Briefs

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16

Excel

Ph.D. Mentors

4 Spring 2013

By any quantitative measure, the University of Florida is a national leader in research. With more than $740 million in research expenditures last year, UF ranked 12th among public universities and 18th overall, according to the National Science Foundation. This funding is essential to the research mission of the uni-versity, helping to pay faculty and staff; equipping labora-tories with everything from genome sequencing machines to test tubes; and provid-ing educational programs for both undergraduate and graduate students.

But lost in all these num-bers, whether they are for ranking college and universi-ties or for figuring out the

federal budget, are the impacts of our research on people.

One needs to look no further than the work being conducted by physical therapy Professor Krista Vandenborne and her colleagues on Du-chenne muscular dystrophy to see research in action.

From a research productiv-ity standpoint Vandenborne is a superstar, with more than $10 million in fund-ing over the past few years. We were able to recruit her and her husband, Associate Professor Glenn Walter of the Department of Physiology and Functional Genomics, to UF because we have some of the finest magnetic resonance imaging machines in the world, a result of our partici-pation in the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

But to her research sub-jects, that funding is just a means to an end. To them, Vandenborne’s research is about finding less invasive, more accurate ways to track the crippling disease that hangs like a death sentence over them.

To them, UF is No. 1 because it is the place where hope for a treatment or a cure resides.

There are countless other examples across our campus and around the state and beyond where citizens of Florida and the nation rely on University of Florida research to solve problems, make discoveries and uncover the secrets of the world we live in. When we do that we’re the best public university to them.

4 Spring 2013

BDavid Norton

Vice President for Research

Physical therapy Professor Krista Vandenborne with Duchenne muscular dystrophy patient Sam Hersom and his father Matt.

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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

University of florida chemists pioneer nanostrUctUre assembly

A team of University of Florida chemistry researchers has developed a technique for growing new materials from nanorods.

Materials with enhanced properties engineered from nanostructures could revolu-tionize the marketplace, from data processing to human medicine. However, attempts to assemble nanoscale objects into sophisticated structures have been largely unsuccess-ful. The UF study is a major breakthrough, showing how thermodynamic forces can be used to manipulate growth of nanoparticles into super-particles with unprecedented precision.

The study was published in the journal Science.

“The reason we want to put nanoparticles together like this is to create new materials with collective prop-erties,” said Charles Cao, UF associate professor of chemis-try and corresponding author of the study. “Like putting oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms together in a two-to-one ratio – the synergy gives you water, something with properties completely dif-ferent from the ingredients themselves.”

In the UF study, a syner-gism of fluorescent nanorods, sometimes used as biomark-ers in biomedical research, resulted in a superparticle with an emission polariza-tion ratio that could make it a good candidate for use in creating a new generation of polarized LEDs, used in devices like 3-D television.

“The technology for mak-ing the single nanorods is well established,” said Tie Wang, a UF postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study. “But what we’ve lacked is a way to assemble them in a controlled fashion to get use-ful structures and materials.”

The team bathed the indi-vidual rods in a series of liq-uid compounds that reacted with certain hydrophobic regions on the nanoparticles and pushed them into place, forming a larger, more com-plex particle.

Two different treatments yielded two different products.

“One treatment gave us something completely unex-pected — these superparticles

with a really sophisticated structure unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Wang said.

The other yielded a less complex structure that Wang and his colleagues were able to grow into a small square of polarized film about one quar-ter the size of a postage stamp.

The researchers said the film could be used to increase efficiency in polarized LED television and computer screens by up to 50 percent, using currently available man-ufacturing techniques.

“I’ve worked in nanopar-ticle assembly for a decade,” said Dmitri Talapin, an asso-ciate professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the study. “There are all sorts of issues to be overcome when assembling building blocks from nanoscale particles. I don’t think anyone has been able to get them to self-assem-ble into superparticles like this before.”

“They have achieved a tour de force in precision and control,” he said.Charles Cao, [email protected]

Tie Wang, [email protected]

Donna Hesterman

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College of Public Health and Health Professions

researchers find way to test hearing loss prevention drUgs

University of Florida researchers have figured out a safe way to create reversible hearing loss as a means to test hearing loss prevention drugs.

“There’s a real need for drug solutions to hearing loss,” said lead investigator Colleen Le Prell, an associate professor in the department of speech, language, and hearing sciences at the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Right now the only options for protecting against noise-induced hearing loss are to turn down what you’re listening to, walk away from it or wear ear plugs, and those options may not be practical for everyone, particularly for those in the military who need to be able to hear threats.”

The findings are described in the journal Ear & Hearing.

About 26 million Ameri-can adults have noise-induced hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deaf-ness and Other Communica-tion Disorders. Prevention is key because damage to hearing-related hair cells in the inner ear by loud noise is irreversible. Hearing aids and implanted devices can help, but they do not restore nor-mal hearing.

Prototype drugs have pre-vented noise-induced hearing loss in laboratory animals, but researchers lacked tests to

determine if the same protec-tion is possible in humans. Those tests are possible now because of the UF efforts, which bring scientists closer to developing drugs to help people at risk of hearing dam-age — from rock concertgoers to factory workers to military personnel working with artil-lery and machinery.

Le Prell’s model uses controlled music levels to reliably cause low-level, tem-porary hearing loss in human participants. Other studies have used beeps or tones, user-selected music levels or music exposures that don’t result in temporary hearing loss. Three monitoring boards ensured that studies of the UF model met national safety standards for research in

Understanding pancreas size may help Unlock caUse of type 1 diabetes

People at risk for Type 1 diabetes may have fewer insulin-producing “beta” cells than people not at risk, a finding that could help researchers shed light on what causes the disease, a University of Florida study shows.

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, revealed that people at risk for Type 1 diabetes had a smaller pancreas than people not at risk.

“This is the first time this has been noted,” said Martha Campbell-Thompson, a professor in the UF

College of Medicine Department of Pathology, Immunology and Laboratory Medicine.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body’s immune system begins attacking its own beta cells, which stop producing the insulin the body needs to convert sugar into energy. Once insulin production stops, often in child-hood, patients must take insulin for the rest of their lives. This differs from Type 2 diabetes,

humans. Co-investigator Dr. Patrick Antonelli, the George T. Singleton Professor and chair of the UF Department of Otolaryngology, provided onsite supervision of study participant safety, and col-laborators at the University of Michigan and Southern Illi-nois University were involved in study design and safety.

To induce temporary hear-ing loss, study participants listened to a digital music player via headphones for four hours at sound levels ranging from 93 decibels — the level of a power lawn mower — to 102 decibels — the noise of a jackhammer. Each partici-pant got a hearing test four times, 15 minutes to three-and-a-quarter hours after his or her listening session, as

College of Medicine

which often can be prevented and treated through improved diet and increased exercise.

Although genetics plays a big role, researchers still don’t know what triggers the autoimmune attack, and after it begins, there is no going back, said Campbell-Thomp-son, director of the pathol-ogy core for the Network for Pancreatic Organ Donors with Diabetes, or nPOD — a human pancreas biorepository housed within the UF Diabe-tes Center of Excellence.

Campbell-Thompson and colleagues examined 164 pancreases from adult organ donors, including those with

auto-antibodies linked to an increased risk for Type 1 diabetes. After examining the organs and comparing them with control samples, the researchers discovered that people at risk for Type 1 dia-betes had pancreases roughly three-fourths the weight of those of patients not at risk for the disease. In addition, patients already diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes had pancreases about half the weight of control samples, Campbell-Thompson said.

The goal of the research, and nPOD, which provides pancreas samples to research-ers nationwide, is first to

understand how the pancreas works and then uncover new and better ways to treat and prevent Type 1 diabetes.

“The findings raise sig-nificant questions about the development and progression of Type 1 diabetes,” said Teo-dora Staeva, at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Founda-tion, which funded the study.

Obtaining and analyzing human pancreas samples has proved crucial because mouse models are no longer consid-ered good examples of Type 1 diabetes in humans.

“There are major differ-ences between human Type 1 diabetes and the animal

models,” Campbell-Thomp-son said. “It’s really chang-ing some of our ideas about when this autoimmune attack might occur, and we still don’t know all the players.”

The researchers next hope to use noninvasive methods such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to gauge pancreas size in live patients.Martha Campbell-Thompson, [email protected]

April Frawley Birdwell

well as follow-up tests one day and one week later. Fif-teen minutes after the music stopped, those who listened to the highest music levels had lost just a small amount of hearing — six decibels, on average. Hearing returned to normal within three hours.

Le Prell’s group will use this testing model in two first-of-a-kind clinical trials of therapeutics designed to determine if noise-induced hearing loss can be prevented in humans. The first study uses a dietary supplement that contains the vitamin A pre-cursor beta carotene, vitamins C and E and the mineral magnesium. This antioxidant formula, the patent for which Le Prell shares, has prevented temporary and permanent

hearing loss in laboratory animals.

In the other study, par-ticipants take SPI-1005, a capsule that contains a new molecule called ebselen, which mimics a protective inner ear protein.

The Food and Drug Administration will monitor the studies.

“We really want to find out what’s going to work and we want to make it possible for strategies that do work to get in the hands of the people who need them,” Le Prell said.Colleen La Prell, [email protected]

Jill Pease

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College of Public Health and Health Professions

researchers examine memory loss, thinking problems after sUrgery

Older adults may be at risk for memory and thinking problems after surgery, and Univer-sity of Florida researchers are using a $2.3 million grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research to study brain imaging as a means to determine the risk.

“Based on our previous studies we believe that there are certain neuro-imaging markers that can tell us which individuals are at greater risk for memory and thinking changes after major surgery,” said Catherine Price, the study’s lead investigator and an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “Ide-ally we want to eliminate the possibility that anesthesia or surgery can cause a dementia such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

Post-surgery decline in brain function is character-ized by subtle changes in

memory, in the ability to learn new information and in the ability to do two or more things at the same time while ignoring distrac-tions. About 40 percent of older adults experience such difficulties immediately fol-lowing major surgery and 14 percent of patients continue to have problems even three months later. Experts don’t know what causes postopera-tive cognitive changes. Epi-demiological studies suggest that older adults and those with less education are at highest risk.

Anesthesiologists rec-ognized the occurrence of postoperative cognitive

dysfunction years ago, but the problem has only recently received more attention.

The UF study will focus on patients undergoing a total knee replacement, a proce-dure performed on a half-million Americans each year, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medi-cal Association.

In the study, 80 knee replacement candidates age 60 and older will receive cognitive testing and MRI brain scans before and after surgery. The investigators will look for brain biomark-ers that are associated with cognitive problems, such as white matter abnormalities and changes to small blood vessels. Researchers will monitor patients up to one year after surgery. Results will be compared with those from a group of 80 individuals of similar age, education and

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Catherine Price has received a $2.5 million grant to study changes in the brain that may occur in elderly people following surgery.

health status, but who are not undergoing surgery.

Price, a neuropsychologist with a joint appointment in anesthesiology, has assembled a multidisciplinary team with expertise in areas such as neu-ropsychology, neuro-imaging, surgery, anesthesia, geriatrics, biomedical engineering, information technology, bio-statistics, biochemistry and molecular biology, for the five-year study supported in part by UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Award from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

“We believe the current study is going to give us use-ful information about patient risk factors and surgery vari-ables that we can then apply toward intervention pro-grams,” Price said. Catherine Price, [email protected]

Jill Pease

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Explore 9

Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration

Uf researchers condUct deep brain stimUlation in alzheimer’s patient

Researchers at the University of Florida have performed deep brain stimulation on a patient with Alzheimer’s disease as part of a clinical trial studying whether the treat-ment can slow progression of the disease.

Called the Advance Study, the four-site clinical trial will evaluate whether using electrodes to stimulate a part of the brain called the fornix can slow memory decline and improve cogni-tive function in patients in the early stages of Alzhei-mer’s disease.

“The goal of treating Alzheimer’s disease with neuromodulation is to try to enhance what patients have and slow down memory loss and the process of the dis-ease so they can have a few more years of good function,” said Dr. Michael Okun, co-director of the UF Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration and a site principal investigator for the

study. “This is a potentially exciting symptomatic therapy.”

Characterized by memory loss and a steady decline in cognitive abilities, Alzheim-er’s disease affects as many as 5.1 million Americans, according to the National Institute on Aging.

Deep brain stimulation also is used to treat Parkin-son’s disease, dystonia and Tourette’s syndrome. In the procedure, researchers carefully place electrodes in specific regions of the brain. When these electrodes are turned on, they send electri-cal signals that prompt a therapeutic response.

“In Alzheimer’s patients there is a very slow loss of brain function,” Okun said.

“These slow changes that happen in the brain lead to the clinical symptoms. The idea is that we are going to try and modulate the circuits to see if we can improve some of the symptoms.”

Researchers decided to test deep brain stimulation in the fornix — a part of the brain that connects the hip-pocampus to the hypothala-mus — after the accidental discovery that stimulating that region of the brain provoked vivid memories in patients, Okun said.

The therapy is being tested at UF, Toronto Western Hos-pital, the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute and Johns Hop-kins University. Overall, 20 patients will be enrolled in the trial, although the electrodes will not be turned on in all of the participants, Okun said.

“This is the best way for us to tell if there is a real response versus a placebo

response,” he said. “It’s very tricky to measure memory and cognition.”

Aside from testing the therapy, researchers also are closely examining how stimulating the brain affects the course of Alzheimer’s dis-ease and whether it prompts changes in oxygen, in glucose levels and in blood flow.

“What we have seen so far is there are very interesting changes in blood flow,” Okun said. “It’s very early and it is hard to judge these things just on pictures, but the pic-tures look very interesting. There is definitely something going on in the circuit.”Dr. Michael Okun, [email protected]

April Frawley Birdwell

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Explore 9

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10 Spring 2013

random temperatUre changes coUld make animals’ adaptation even harder

A study of how a simple virus adapts to temperature change could have implications for animals as they adapt to unpredictable environmental conditions.

Researchers at the Univer-sity of Florida and Yale Uni-versity studied how a simple virus responded to tempera-ture changes in three different ways: constant, in a recogniz-able pattern, and at random.

The findings, published in the journal Evolution, suggest that organisms that are long-lived and have low genetic variation — such as manatees, polar bears or cheetahs — may be in for a rough time.

“We didn’t specifically take the predictions of cli-mate change and mimic that … that wasn’t the point of the study,” said UF’s Barry Alto, an assistant professor of arbovirology at the Florida Medical Entomology Lab in Vero Beach, a part of UF’s

Institute of Food and Agri-cultural Sciences. “Rather, we are fundamentally studying how an organism adapts to temperature change when that temperature change comes in different ways. Because we know that the pattern of change makes a difference.”

Alto began by cloning the RNA vesicular stoma-titis virus, which typically affects livestock. The virus is often used to study evolu-tionary processes because its genetic blueprint is simple, its populations multiply rapidly and one f lask of host cells used to grow the virus can yield millions or even bil-lions of viruses. Even better: Researchers can freeze the virus indefinitely, creating

a near-permanent archive, comparable to a fossil record.

The same ancestor virus was used to create 20 separate populations, and researchers divided the 20 populations into four test groups: One batch was kept at a consistent temperature of 84.2 degrees Fahrenheit, considered the ‘low’ temperature; the second was exposed to a ‘high’ tem-perature of 98.6 degrees Fahr-enheit; the third group was exposed to the high and low temperatures in a predictable pattern of alternating days; and the fourth group was exposed to a random pattern of temperatures that ranged from 84.2 to 98.6 degrees.

Afterward, the scientists tested the viruses’ fitness against that of the ancestral clone.

The viruses exposed to the predictable but alternating temperature pattern were the most fit; the viruses exposed

to consistent high and low temperatures followed; and to the researchers’ surprise, the viruses exposed to random temperatures were the least fit — meaning the population couldn’t improve or adapt when faced with randomly changing temperatures.

The findings were a sur-prise because viruses are among the most adaptable organisms. For example, the influenza virus mutates from one season to the next. Also surprising, he said, was that the virus could not adapt although the temperature dis-crepancy was only 14 degrees.

It’s reasonable to expect, Turner said, that if viruses have trouble with randomly changing temperatures, ani-mals far less suited to change almost certainly will have trouble.Barry Alto, [email protected]

Mickie Anderson

10 Spring 2013

A study published in the journal BMC Plant Biology found for the first time that plant roots in space display normal movements, even in the absence of gravity.

Scientists previously thought the movements, known as waving and skew-ing, were caused by gravity pulling on roots as they sam-ple their growing surface with touch, said Anna-Lisa Paul, one of the study’s lead authors and a UF horticultural

sciences research associate professor.

“The skewing and wav-ing of roots has always been thought to be dependent on gravity, but as the images from our experiment started to come down from the Inter-national Space Station in early 2010, it was clear that gravity was not required after all,” said Paul, of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

“Roots in space make these same kinds of movements and

Jeff Williams, an astronaut on the International Space Station, harvests samples from a University of Florida experiment that tested the effects of gravity on plant root orientation.

gravity not needed to orient root growth in space

Plants in space take root in much the same way as plants on Earth, a finding that could be important for space agriculture, according to University of Florida researchers.

Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences

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some earth bacteria sUrvive, grow at extremely low pressUre

University of Florida researchers have discovered that some Earth bacteria can live under low-pressure conditions found on Mars.

The results could help scientists protect Mars from contamination by Earth bac-teria during spacecraft mis-sions and aid in the search for life on Mars.

The researchers revealed their findings in two studies — one in the journal Pro-ceedings of the National Acad-emy of Sciences and one in the journal Astrobiology.

“As we send spacecraft to Mars, we want to have con-fidence that we’re not going to contaminate the landing sites,” said Andrew Schuerger, a co-author and a research assistant professor in the plant pathology department, a part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

Wayne Nicholson, also a co-author and a professor in the microbiology and cell

science department, said he and Schuerger want to know if Earth bacteria can sur-vive, let alone grow.

Schuerger and Nicholson found bacteria in the genera Serratia and Carnobacterium that could survive under Mar-tian conditions of low oxygen, freezing temperatures and 7 millibars of atmospheric pres-sure. Pressure at sea level on Earth is about 1,013 millibars.

With these discoveries, new experiments to test the bacte-ria under more than 17 other harsh factors on the surface of Mars — including high salt levels, intense radiation and severely dry conditions — can now be conducted.

Identifying conditions the bacteria can survive will help scientists identify loca-tions on Mars most at risk

for contamination and most conducive to microbial life, Nicholson said.

“It’s a conundrum,” he said. “Because if you’re look-ing for life, you want to go to the places that are most likely to harbor life, and of course those are the very same places that are most sensitive to being contaminated by Earth organisms.”

Preventing the escape of Earth microbes is important to minimize a “false positive,” mistaking an Earth microbe for a Mars microbe.

Finding bacteria on Mars would help scien-tists test a theory that planets are not biologi-cally isolated. If bacteria

are found, they can be genetically tested to see if they are related to Earth

bacteria, meaning life began on one planet and was transferred to the other. If bac-teria are not found or are not related, it

could mean life started in two different places.For the PNAS study,

researchers looked at growth of bacteria recovered from drilling 40 to 70 feet into Siberian permafrost, while the Astrobiology study exam-ined bacteria commonly found on spacecraft.

NASA funded the PNAS study, and NASA and the Florida Space Grant Consor-tium funded the Astrobiology study.Andrew Schuerger, [email protected]

Wayne Nicholson, [email protected]

Robert H. Wells

Explore 11

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choices that you see on the ground.”

The findings suggest plants could be cultivated in reduced-gravity environ-ments, such as space stations or the moon, said Rob Ferl, the study’s other lead author and a UF/IFAS horticultural sciences professor.

“As space agriculturalists, we really want to know that when we move to the moon, when we move to Mars — which don’t have the same amount of gravity that we have — can we still grow plants? Will their roots still work right in a fractional gravity environment?” Ferl said. “And the answer is yes, definitely.”

Researchers grew Wassil-weskija and Columbia varieties of Arabidopsis thaliana, plants related to mustard that scien-tists often use as model plants for research, on both the ISS in zero gravity and on Earth.

The plants were grown in a nutrient-rich agar solu-tion in specialized chambers developed by Kennedy Space Center engineers that allowed a high-resolution camera to photograph plant growth every six hours. Images of the plants in space and on Earth were transmitted to the researchers for real-time analysis.

The chamber housing the plants on the ground was set to provide the same tem-perature and environmental

conditions experienced by the plants in orbit.

Although differences in root growth were recorded between the plants on Earth and the plants in space, over-all, root growth behaviors were similar.

Both varieties demon-strated growth away from the seed and typical patterns of skewing — or growing at a slant, and waving — or growing in tight, alternat-ing curves. For example, Wassilweskija roots skewed strongly to the right in space while Columbia roots slightly skewed to the left, just as they do on Earth.

Paul said in the absence of gravity, perhaps the plant is

responding to another direc-tional cue, such as the over-head light source.

“The space flight environ-ment is absolutely outside the evolutionary experience of any organism on the face of the planet,” Paul said. “It was very intriguing for to us to realize there is an evolution-ary adaptation for roots to grow away from the seed to find the nutrients and water the plant needs to survive in the absence of gravity.”

The experiment was funded by NASA. Claire E. Amalfitano, who was a bio-logical scientist in Ferl’s lab, is also an author of the study.Robert Ferl, [email protected]

Anna-Lisa Paul, [email protected]

Robert H. Wells


College of Education

$25 million award to focUs on teaching stUdents with disabilities

The University of Florida College of Edu-cation will receive $25 million over the next five years to address inadequate teaching of children with disabilities.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Spe-cial Education Programs has awarded the first of five annual $5 million grants to UF to establish a center to support the development of effective teachers — in gen-eral and special education classrooms – and education leaders to serve students with disabilities.

“This grant represents the Education Department’s largest investment ever in improving education for

students with disabilities,” said co-principal investiga-tor and UF special education professor Mary Brownell, who also is working with spe-cial education professors Paul Sindelar and Erica McCray.

Brownell said the new Collaboration for Educator Development and Account-ability and Reform, also known as CEDAR Cen-ter, will work with states to strengthen professional standards and certification programs for general and

The five-year grant will fund major scholarships and hands-on training opportuni-ties to recruit and prepare top science and math majors to teach, mainly in Florida’s neediest middle and high schools.

The NSF Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program funds scholarships, stipends and academic programs for STEM majors who pursue a teaching credential and com-mit to teaching at least two years in high-needs public school districts.

Over the next five years, UF will award Noyce scholar-ships worth $10,000 each to 50 undergraduate students enrolled in UFTeach, a program designed to attract some of UF’s best students and expose them to teaching through intensive, super-vised classroom experiences in high-poverty schools. UFTeach is a joint effort of the colleges of Education and Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Enrolled students continue their science or math major while pursuing a minor in

special education teachers, and school and school dis-trict leaders who work with students with disabilities. The center also will help states revise their teacher evaluation systems to align with the higher professional standards.

“Studies establish that our current systems for licens-ing, preparing, developing, supporting and evaluating teachers to effectively instruct students with unique needs are wholly inadequate,” Brownell said. “The CEDAR Center approach is to reform and align these areas with research-proven practices and professional standards.

“Students with disabili-ties perform in school more poorly than any other sub-group of students. With truly effective instruction, though, many of these students have abilities that will allow them to advance and succeed in college, career and other post-secondary options.”

Through the CEDAR Center, the UF group is part-nering with nine organiza-tions with plans to roll out a special-education reform program to 20 states.Mary Brownell, [email protected]

Paul Sindelar, [email protected]

Erica McCray, [email protected]

Larry Lansford

12 Spring 2013


project seeking to prepare science, math teachers in high-need schools

The National Science Foundation will invest $1.2 million in a program to allow the University of Florida College of Education to boost teacher training for STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math.

education and most of the professional educator require-ments. The scholarships usually kick in for selected students during their senior year, when most UFTeach students serve their semester-long, full-time internship in a middle or high school science or math class.

“The senior year can be difficult for UFTeach students. The classroom-based apprentice-teaching course demands significant student time and attention. The Noyce scholarships will allow the students to focus on their apprenticeships in the classroom and ease their financial concerns,” said UF science education professor Tom Dana, the co-director of UFTeach and the principal

investigator of the NSF-backed effort, which UF has dubbed the STEM EduGa-tors program. “EduGators” is a traditional nickname for students, alumni and other stakeholders of the College of Education.

Another 90 UFTeach students, or 18 per year, will each receive stipends of nearly $5,000 while serving summer internships in informal science education settings such as the Florida Museum of Natural History at UF, zoos, botani-cal parks and nature centers. Interns must first attend an orientation and “boot camp” promoting learning in infor-mal education settings.

“The informal teaching experience will help interns build their toolkit of ideas

and teaching strengths and help them develop strategies for engaging a wide variety of learners in their classrooms,” said UFTeach associate director Dimple Flesner, the co-principal investigator of STEM EduGators.

Flesner said the interns also will participate in a mentored STEMS EduGa-tor online community of students, faculty and staff to share insights, concerns and “aha moments” they experi-ence during internships.

The NSF-Noyce scholar-ship program is the latest initiative the College of Education has launched to bolster teaching and learning in the STEM subjects. The UFTeach program received a state workforce policy board’s

Best Practices Award in 2011 for addressing the critical shortage of math and science teachers. The newest NSF project follows on the heels of a $2 million state grant to create prototype “teacher induction” programs to sup-port Florida science and math teachers in their first two years on the job.

An earlier NSF grant in 2011 pairs the College of Education with its K-12 laboratory school, P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, in a $5 million cam-paign to boost middle school student achievement by improving science knowledge among practicing teachers.Tom Dana, [email protected]

Dimple Flesner, [email protected]

Larry Lansford

College of Engineering

nsf chooses Uf professor to head engineering directorate

The National Science Foundation has selected University of Florida engineering professor Pramod P. Khargonekar to serve as assistant director for the Directorate of Engineering, known as the ENG.

Khargonekar, who will retain his position at UF, leads the ENG directorate with an annual budget of more than $800 million. ENG invests in frontier engi-neering research and educa-tion, cultivates an innovation ecosystem, and develops the next-generation engineer.

Currently, Khargonekar is the deputy director for tech-nology at the U.S. Depart-ment of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, known as ARPA-E. He is the Eckis Professor of Electrical and Computer

Engineering at UF, a posi-tion he has held since 2001. He served as the dean of the College of Engineering from 2001 to 2009.

“Dr. Khargonekar brings to NSF extensive leadership, creativity and initiative in engineering research,” said NSF Director Subra Suresh. “He has helped pioneer inter-disciplinary efforts between the biological and engineer-ing research communities and demonstrated a deep appreciation for developing the STEM workforce, which is an NSF priority.”

NSF’s investments in engineering research and education aim to strengthen a national capacity for innova-tion that can lead over time to the creation of new shared wealth and a better quality of life. The engineering director-ate also supports NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technol-ogy Transfer programs.

Khargonekar’s engineer-ing research encompasses control systems theory and

applications, smart grid and renewable energy, semi-conductor manufacturing, and modeling and control of neural systems, among other areas. He has received many awards and honors, including the IEEE Baker Prize, American Automatic Control Council’s Donald Eckman Award, the Dis-tinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

Most recently, Khar-gonekar has been a member of NSF’s Engineering Advi-sory Committee, where he provided guidance to ENG on strategic directions.

He began his NSF appointment in March.Pramod P. Khargonekar, [email protected]

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school of ants enlists science bUffs

Florida was already the ant capital of the United States and now the University of Florida is headquarters for the School of Ants, a nationwide project that asks citizen scientists to help collect ant data.

The science buffs will col-lect ants from their yards and neighborhoods so that ento-mologists can identify each species and plot its location on digital maps that eventu-ally will provide a snapshot of ant distribution around the country.

“Knowledge of the pres-ence of a species of ant might help for things like quaran-tine and control, if the species is a problem,” said founder Andrea Lucky, an assistant scientist with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sci-ences. “If we find a rare ant, or an ant that’s way outside its known range, we may want to keep an eye on it purely for academic purposes.”

Lucky brought the school with her to UF when she

accepted a position in UF’s Department of Entomol-ogy and Nematology. She launched the school at North Carolina State University in 2011 with Rob Dunn, a biol-ogy assistant professor. Lucky is thrilled to be in Florida, which has more ant species than any other state, with 150 native ants and 50 more that hail from elsewhere, including the notorious red imported fire ant.

“We want to really focus on Florida,” Lucky said. “The ant populations are so diverse, and we’re eager to get a han-dle on what’s here.”

Scientists often have a poor understanding of ant distri-bution at the city or county level, Lucky said, because many species are difficult to

14 Spring 2013

Andrea Lucky, an assistant scientist with the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, holds a box containing ant specimens collected in Florida.

identify. The School of Ants solves that problem by enlist-ing ant experts.

So far, the school has identified the spread of the invasive Asian needle ant from its original stomping grounds in North Carolina to Wisconsin, New York and Washington state. The vora-cious pest wipes out native

ant populations in hardwood forests and packs a painful sting.

“This is the kind of thing citizen science can accom-plish, because you have so many eyes and so many hands out there working,” Lucky said.Andrea Lucky, [email protected]

Tom Nordlie

Volunteers can register at http://www.schoolofants.org

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invasive lionfish can best be controlled in targeted areas

Invasive lionfish may never be eradicated from Florida’s coastal waters, but they can be controlled in targeted areas by using plenty of manpower, a University of Florida study shows.


Native to the Indo-Pacific, the spiny, ornate fish began to turn up in the mid-1980s along the Atlantic seaboard. Their numbers exploded in the last decade, and the fish can now be found in South American and Caribbean waters as well as the Gulf of Mexico.

Lionfish are voracious predators and pose a signifi-cant threat to valuable native species such as grouper, snap-per and shrimp.

Some areas have tried to control the fish with derbies, where divers and snorkelers spear or net as many fish as possible. The study, led by Tom Frazer, interim direc-tor of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, attempted to determine how intense and consistent such efforts would need to be to curb a lionfish population.

“How far do we have to knock them down in order to prevent a potential problem? This was really the first time that researchers have gone out and said we’re going to quantify and characterize how many fish we can pull off these reefs, how much effort that requires and ultimately, then, how much money it might cost to continue that effort,” said Frazer, a faculty member with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The work was pub-lished in Reviews in Fisheries Science.

The UF team spent much of 2011 working with the Central Caribbean Marine Institute, local dive masters and scuba volunteers who

removed lionfish weekly from several sites off Little Cay-man Island, in the Caribbean Sea. The team asked the divers not to remove lionfish from an area called Rock Bottom Wall, so it could serve as a control site.

At the lionfish removal sites, lionfish density decreased over time, and the size of the fish that remained were smaller on average. In comparison, lionfish numbers increased markedly at the control site.

When the study began, it wasn’t unusual to capture lionfish that measured about 400 millimeters long. But by June 2011, at one dive site called Blacktip Boulevard, the removed fish ranged from

140 to 295 millimeters in length, with 83 percent of the fish smaller than 220 mil-limeters. Larger lionfish are more likely to consume bigger prey, such as grouper or snap-per, while smaller lionfish prefer to nibble on shrimp, he said.

The appearance of lionfish recently near the Big Bend area of Florida has scientists concerned, he said, because that area’s large seagrass beds provide a critical nursery for gag grouper, an important sport and food fish.

The findings have laid the groundwork for future studies into ecological impacts of lion-fish on native fish populations and the cost-effectiveness of removal efforts, Frazer said.

“That’s our goal,” he said. “You’re not going to be able to determine how many resources you can use for that problem until you have an idea how much time and effort is involved in removing the fish.”Tom Frazer, [email protected]

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By Donna Hesterman

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UF scientists and artists are blending

their UniqUe talents to mUtUal beneFit

Elif AkcAli sits At A sunny kitchen tAble absorbed in her work. She’s an industrial engineer by training, but today she is busy folding colored squares of

paper into hundreds of palm-sized origami cranes. This particular flock is destined for an art show at a local gallery, but others lie arranged in patterns of crimson and sage on a nearby triptych.

“I’m not sure what my colleagues would make of all this,” Akcali laughs. She’s an associ-ate professor of industrial and systems engineering at UF. “I feel like I’m becoming this crazy crane lady, but I have all these stories to tell and this is a way to get them out.”

The birds in the three-piece arrangement next to her convey a story from Greek mythol-ogy about how Hermes, inspired by the shapes and sounds of cranes in flight, created the alphabet. Another piece depicts a tragedy that unfolded in her native Turkey in 1994 when rebels tortured and killed a busload of unarmed soldiers returning home from boot camp.

The stories are complex and sometimes very emotional, but Akcali uses symbolism to help her distill them into clear, simple images. The process is not unlike what she does as an engineer when she uses numbers and algorithms to describe unwieldy problems that emerge in large-scale industrial systems.

“But sometimes I feel a little too boxed in,” she says of her work as an engineer. “Engineers have to be creative in that you have to be a problem solver, but I needed something more.”

So she began taking art workshops off campus and eventually settled on collage and origami as her creative outlet. The art, she says, isn’t just a distraction from her work. The training, along with exposure to other artists, is informing her work as a scientist

and a teacher. “It’s not an immediate impact — no Aha! moments,” she says. “It’s more

about learning to be open to possibilities that seem unorthodox, and knowing that creativity is a process that can be taught.”

Akcali says that in the past, at work, she has felt alone in her need to create art, but that things are beginning to change. Scientists, engineers and artists from all over campus are organizing themselves into a committee called SEA Change

that aims to break down some of the barriers that separate artists from scientists in academia.

“Most scientists who practice some form of art will tell you that it makes us better at our craft,” says Angela Lindner, an associate professor of environmental

engineering sciences at UF. “I’m not a neuroscientist, but there is plenty of research that suggests scientific genius and artistic talent are closely linked.”

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“These maTrices are webs of values and

expressions ThaT are relaTed. buT you

can’T see These relaTionships by jusT looking

aT a massive Table of numbers. you don’T

necessarily have To undersTand The maTh

behind Them To appreciaTe Their beauTy.”

— Tim davis

Managers at AT&T use the digital imagery to help them visualize expan-sive data networks. Davis uses them to find the best mathematical strategy when he’s writing code for a solver.

“These matrices are webs of values and expressions that are related,” Davis says. “But you can’t see these relation-ships by just looking at a massive table of numbers.”

The visualizations are a tool for Davis, but they are also art, he says. They are appealing on a superficial level. “You don’t necessarily have to understand the math behind them to appreciate their beauty,” he says.

Kevin Dana, a senior majoring in chemical engineering at UF, expresses a similar sentiment when he talks about his passion for music.

Lindner leads the SEA Change committee at UF and is active in a national organization called the Alliance for Arts in Research Universities. The two groups share a common mindset that science and engineering cannot thrive separate from the arts.

“The University of Florida is leading in this initiative,” Lindner says. “We aren’t just philosophizing about the benefits of providing opportunities for scientists and artists to collaborate — we are actually doing it.”

For example, Lindner and her SEA Change colleagues are currently working on a plan to allow engineering students to minor in art subjects.

The idea is to recreate an academic environment where a new generation of DaVincis and Galileos can emerge. Lindner says that, in many ways, engineers have been stripped of impor-tant training and inspiration that comes with an arts education. “We want that back,” she says.

“There is a real hunger for this,” Lindner says. Last year when the College of Engineering showcased artwork created by faculty and students at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, it was one of the best-attended events of the year.

“Over 900 people showed up that night,” she says. “We took over the place with musicians, dancers, paintings and sculpture.”

Tim Davis, a professor in UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, shared some of his work at the 2011 show. Davis writes “solver” software that calculates answers for huge, complex matrix problems used in program-ming everything from Google Maps street view software to nuclear power plant control systems.

The matrix problems in their raw form are not much to look at. Davis describes them as giant Sudoku puzzles that would take reams of

paper to print. But when viewed through special visualization software, they become colorful

abstract images that look like string art.Davis’ colleague, Yifan Hu at AT&T Laboratories, writes the

visualization software that generates the art, based

on the mathematical structure of a particu-

lar matrix problem.

“Music is applied physics, which is applied math,” he says. “It’s all just pres-sure waves and vibrations that stimulate sensory organs in your ears. But unlike math, music elicits an emotional response in almost everyone. You don’t have to be a mathematician to appreciate it.”

Dana sings in a barbershop quar-tet, plays saxophone in the university marching band and dabbles in several other instruments. His quartet played at the Art and Engineering show, and he’s currently working with Lindner’s SEA Change committee to help bridge the gap between the arts and sciences at UF.

“This is a no-brainer for the kids,” Lindner says. Many students want to go back and forth between the arts and science as part of their education, but hard science degree programs aren’t structured to allow for that, she says.

Eric McLamore, an assistant profes-sor of agricultural and biological engi-neering at UF, was once one of those kids. He played in a band and wrote poetry as an engineering undergraduate, but had to give up his affair with the arts while finishing his graduate work at Purdue University. Now a faculty member at UF, he invites artists into his laboratory.

The classroom blend provides a novel source of inspiration for the artists, while giving engineers important skills that help them as researchers. Five artists will be working in McLamore’s lab in 2013 as part of a new university-funded program called SARP, or the Student Artists in Residence Program.

McLamore’s lab builds tiny tools and sensors for observing the physiological processes plants and organisms undergo when stressed by disease, drought or pollution.

“Artists who have joined us in the lab in the past have been better welders than the engineering students, and they have drawing and communication skills that are extremely useful in the kind of work we do,” he says.

“We can’t actually see some of the things we are dealing with, like how a certain protein binds with another to trigger a physiological response,” McLamore says. Yet

Codified II, a juried exhibition, held during the Florida Genetics 2012 Symposium, featured selected artworks by UF School of Art + Art History students and alumni — many created specifically for this exhibition — that explore themes surrounding genetics and art. The artists competed for material and fabrication grants as well as exhibition awards.

CREATION, Matthew Treherne, Pen and ink on board, 2011, Codified II.

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their research demands that they be able to communicate to one another what they think may be happening. “Trying to describe these processes in words is crazy,” he says. “Drawing a picture makes much more sense.”

Jamie Gillooly, an associate professor of biology at UF, says arts training is an imperative for educating scientists. He believes it so strongly that he left his teaching and research duties in the biol-ogy department to spend a year in UF’s School of Art and Art History in 2011.

“Some of my colleagues didn’t get it,” he says. “I’m sure they thought I was just over there finger painting or something.”

But he wasn’t.Gillooly spent his year co-teaching

courses with art school faculty and creating venues for artists and scientists to work together.

“Studio artists get just the sort of training that researchers need to be successful,” Gillooly says. “The arts have these well-developed models and prac-tices for teaching the creative process,

“arTisTs can help scienTisTs learn To approach Their research in a less linear

fashion ... however we musT be careful noT To lose The

purpose of arT for arT’s sake in service To science.”

— richard heipp

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THE MECHANIZED MAN, Sorina Vaziri, 2012, Codified II.

and students are expected from Day One to wrestle with open-ended ques-tions. They also learn how to deal with setbacks and failures early on.”

Gillooly says that young scientists get no such training, and that can be a prob-lem when they reach graduate school.

“The hardest day for a new Ph.D. student in science is the one when he or she is given the keys to their cubicle and told go come up with a research project,” he says. “The last time they did something that self-directed or creative was probably in the sixth grade science fair.”

Artists can help scientists learn to approach their research in a less linear fashion, says Richard Heipp, direc-tor of UF’s School of Art and Art History. And artists can learn a lot from scientists, too, he says. Sculptures use engineering principles to make their structures sound, chemistry can be used to engineer new paints and pigments and digital technology is an increasingly important tool for artists to master.

“However, we must be careful not to lose the purpose of art for art’s sake in service to science,” Heipp says. The line between art and science is easily blurred, but it’s all about the intention of the person who is creating the piece, he says. If the purpose is to make some-thing that causes people to reflect on the human condition or ponder themes like man’s inhumanity to man, then it is art. If the purpose is to do science and the result is a beautiful image of some sort, then it probably isn’t art, Heipp says.

“It’s a fine line — but one we would like to keep,” he says. “Science has very practical intentions, but art does not. It won’t cure cancer, but it can heal your soul.”

The faculty leading SEA Change at UF would no doubt agree with Heipp as to the soul-healing attributes of art; however, they also see a practical angle to re-incorporating arts training into research universities’ science programs.

“I can teach a student the facts about ecology or genetics,” Gillooly says, “but I can’t hand them a deep-seated sense of curiosity or confidence that leads them to ask their own questions about the natural world. Arts training, however, can give them that.”

Jamie GilloolyAssociate Professor, Department of Biology(352) 392-2743 [email protected]

Richard HeippProfessor and Director, School of Art + Art History (352) 273-3021 [email protected]

Angela LindnerAssociate Professor, Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences(352) [email protected]

UNTITLED 19, Logan Marconi, Oil on canvas, 2012, Codified II.

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LA historic fishing

village is now Florida’s clam capital

By Frank StephenSon

leaving the monotonous, piney flanks of a long, two-lane highway, travelers to cedar key, florida first catch the scent of sea air, then watch a marsh-and-mangrove vista unfold in natural profusion toward a hazy

Gulf of Mexico horizon.If they know anything at all about Florida’s modern history —

above all its long and tortured love affair with development — visitors instinctively know that they’ve just arrived at a special place — a rare piece of Florida’s yesteryear somehow miraculously preserved in its own earthy time warp.

Perched on a point of marshy “high ground” (elevation 10 feet) in southern Levy County just an hour west of Gainesville, Cedar Key (pop. 702) relishes its specialness. Nature — together with a series of

astonishingly astute political decisions over the decades — has isolated this tiny coastal hamlet in a lush, unsul-lied oasis that has no peer on the Gulf perimeter.

Since Herbert Hoover signed a bill in 1929 creating the 762-acre Cedar Key National Wildlife Refuge, another 88,000 acres of state and federal acquisitions have permanently sealed off Cedar Key to the onslaught of most of the human excesses that have ruined the heart of wild Florida. In 1867, a young adventurer who would

go on to design America’s national park system, John Muir, ended a 1,000-mile trek he began in Indianapolis at Cedar Key. If he returned today, Muir could still be entranced by the “many gems of palmy islets” that helped inspire him to dedicate his life to preserving America’s wild areas.

Muir surely would also take note that the town is still living rather well off the bounty of its extraordinary natural resources. In his day, it was a global trade in locally produced lumber, turpentine and seafood that dominated Cedar Key commerce. When the last, thick stands of

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the area’s namesake — the eastern red cedar — fell to pencil-making factories around 1900, townsfolk were obliged to depend even more heavily on the sea for their liveli-hoods, sensing it was the one sure thing they could count on.

And so it remains today, more than a century on. What has changed — and that’s just about everything tied to the town’s now-famous seafood industry — is the seafood itself.

Instead of mullet, oysters and crabs, for the past 15 years the phrase “Cedar Key seafood” largely has come to mean essentially one thing — clams. Actually, clams and more clams. Thanks to an extraordinary turn of events, the good people of Cedar Key can — and frequently do — thank the lowly clam for saving their marine heritage, and maybe even their town itself.

But a visitor can get a rise out of a Cedar Key clam farmer by calling his catch “lowly.” The tasty bivalve may live at the bottom of nature’s food web, but that’s about the only low point in the remarkable story of Florida clam farming. Today the enterprise is pegged by state economists as having a total annual economic impact of roughly $53 million, a figure that nearly doubles that of Florida’s other, far older and more famous shellfish business, oystering — a wild harvest largely centered in Franklin County in the Panhandle.

After Florida voters approved a ban on gill nets in 1994, Cedar Key — where net-caught fish had fired the economy for generations — stared financial and cultural catastrophe in the face. But in just five short but busy years, the town was able to claim supremacy among the nation’s producers of farm-raised clams. This improbable success story is one that combines the spirit of a committed, never-say-die community unafraid of hard work with that of Florida politics done right and the know-how of the 48-year-old University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS).

“CLAMELOT” “The net ban was devastating to this community, but the problems began before

that. It was the closure of the oyster beds in 1990 that was the catalyst for what you see here today.”

With some effort, Leslie Sturmer’s voice carries above the thrum of a 90-horsepower Yamaha outboard pushing an 18-foot, flat-bottomed skiff through a foot-and-a-half chop. At the helm, she eases up the throttle and widens her stance for the short, bumpy ride out to the shores of Dog Island, one of the 20-odd uninhabited barrier islands that make up the Cedar Key archipelago. On this clear, blustery morning in late December, Sturmer is heading into the heart of “Clamelot,” a place she knows well.

The riff off the Arthurian legend has been a favorite nickname for Cedar Key since 1998, when the town made headlines for growing more clams than any other place in the country after being in the business only five years. Sturmer was into just her third year then as the state’s only shellfish extension agent, working for IFAS and on permanent assignment in Cedar Key. She had eagerly taken the job as soon as it was created in 1995. Her sole mission: do whatever it took to help Cedar Key’s young clam-farming operation get up and running.

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that we added clams proved to be our salvation.”

Sturmer is heading toward a tree-studded shoreline where hundreds of small-bore PVC pipes protrude from shallow water. She’s just entered one of Cedar Key’s five duly authorized high-density clam lease areas. Beneath only four feet or less of muddy water lay hundreds of heavy-duty, polyester mesh bags loaded with clams in various stages of development. Farmers pin the bags to the bottom in neat rows that can extend a hundred yards or more. Sediment covers the bags soon after they’re planted, and barring predators, drops in salinity, lethal water temperatures — always a summer threat — or a catastrophic storm, pea-sized baby clams will reach harvestable size in a year or so.

Sturmer throttles back and maneu-vers her boat parallel to one of the rows outlined by the barnacle-encrusted pipes. Her helper, Reggie Markham, drops an anchor off the bow and Sturmer kills the engine.

With Markham in a full-body wetsuit and Sturmer in waders, the two ease over the gunnels and steady themselves in chest-high, chocolate-colored water. Markham slips on a dive mask and plunges face-first into the

“I’d been in aquaculture all my life, been in some successes and some doozy failures,” she says. “But I’d never been in a place where it was truly part of the community.”

Armed with a master’s in marine aquaculture from Auburn, Sturmer had previously worked in Texas in a large, successful redfish hatchery, then in Apalachicola on a farm-raised oyster project that eventually failed. She first saw Cedar Key in 1991 when, working for Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Fort Pierce, she signed on to help Cedar Key fishermen deal with the sudden death of their 150-year-old oyster industry.

In 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shut down the area’s commercial oystering operation in the Suwannee Sound, the vast estuary that serves as Cedar Key’s northern marine perimeter. High and persistent levels of sewage-borne bacteria escaping from too many septic tanks triggered the federal action. More than a hundred workers were out of a job overnight. Sturmer was sent in to help retrain workers in a federally funded retraining effort in aquaculture named “Project Ocean.”

“The project included both oysters and clams,” she recalled. “The fact

S“PROJECT OCEAN.”

STURMER WAS SENT IN TO HELP

RETRAIN WORKERS IN A STATE-FUNDED

RETRAINING EFFORT IN AQUACULTURE

NAMED

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December-cold water, quickly emerging with the end of a muddy clam bag in his grasp. Sturmer helps him lift it into the boat.

“Whoa, these are real beauties,” she exclaims back aboard as Markham snips open the bag and pours its contents into a large basket. Dozens of shimmering, glossy shells pile up, looking for all the world as if a manicurist had just bathed them in nail polish. And yet until minutes before, the bivalves had been buried in muddy sand for 12 months.

“These are sunray venus clams,” Sturmer says. “This is a native Florida clam that we’re trying to get established as another component of clam aqua-culture here. They’ve got tremendous potential.”

Getting another species of clam geared up for full-scale farming just makes good marketing sense, Sturmer explains. Cedar Key’s spectacular rise as a clam-farming capital has come at the risk of putting all its eggs in one biological basket, in a sense.

Currently, farmers in Cedar Key and the 11 counties on both coasts where clam farming is occurring grow only the hard-shell clam (Mercenaria mercenaria). Known as the northern quahog, the clams also get marketed as midneck, littlenecks and topnecks — names all based on size. Should something threaten the species without a backup in the pipeline, the young industry could face disaster.

“This is a big part of what we hope to do here, to diversify the industry to help it grow and sustain itself,” Sturmer says. “I think we’ve made good progress, but we still have lots to do.”

PROJECT WAVEIn her office at the George Kirkpatrick Marine Laboratory overlooking a stretch

of marsh that becomes the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge — one of the area’s eight formalized conservation districts — Sturmer reflects on her years in Cedar Key. The building she shares with her three-person team honors the late state senator from Gainesville who pushed for funding in the early 1990s aimed at saving Cedar Key’s economy through aquaculture. In the eyes of most locals, Kirkpatrick was a hero.

“He had a special place in his heart for these coastal fishermen,” Sturmer says. “He and (former state representative) Allen Boyd went to bat for the community here and got the funding for Project Ocean. The senator also wound up bringing IFAS into clam farming.”

When that retraining effort ended in 1993, few sensed that it would essentially be a demonstration project for an even bigger effort. “Project Wave” was launched in 1995 to cope with the cataclysmic outfall of the net ban. To many, the law was seen as the proverbial nail in the coffin for Cedar Key’s fishing heritage. Unlike its predecessor, Project Wave was designed exclusively for displaced net fishermen and focused entirely on growing clams. Despite their plight, area fishermen initially greeted the effort with little enthusiasm.

“There was a lot of skepticism, you bet, but what choice did they have?” Sturmer says. “Their oyster reefs were still shut down, and now they couldn’t catch mullet

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Joey Baxman of Scale Key Clams retrieves a bag of clams from his company's lease area in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Canymore. If they wanted to stay on the water, they had no choice but to give clam farming a try.”

Sturmer’s first years on the job were a blur of meetings with local, federal, state and university officials, building teams and finding expertise wherever she could in a variety of essential fields. She dealt with bureaucrats in at least three state agencies, all with overlap-ping or duplicative missions, to finally hammer out a workable plan to issue leases for state-owned submerged land, the linchpin of the entire effort.

She also organized scores of training workshops, wrote reams of grants seeking money and help and became the “go-to” person for solving problems. Sturmer quickly became the face of Cedar Key’s bold venture into a whole new way of life — clam farming, a phrase typically heard in the same breath with “the New England coast.”

But the match that lit the fuse proved to be a nifty bit of marine biology that probably wouldn’t be permitted in today’s world. With help from her colleagues at Harbor Branch — a leader in marine aquaculture in Florida — Sturmer brought Mercenaria mercenaria to Cedar Key from Florida’s

east coast, where the clam was native. Cedar Key was home to Mercenaria’s close rela-tive, Mercenaria campechianus, a fine-eating clam but nonetheless one that research had shown couldn’t match the shelf-life of its popular East Coast cousin.

“Even though it’s the same state, it’s two different coasts, and regs today possibly would prohibit what we did,” Sturmer says. “Now, with the agencies’ blessings, these two species are being evaluated in breeding efforts to improve productivity while maintaining product quality.”

And what a colossal waste of a resource that would have been. Cedar Key sits at the ecological epicenter of ideal clam-growing country. If nature ever created the place for happy clams, Cedar Key and its environs is it.

Topping the reasons is the abundance of clean saltwater. Fate has favored the area as far as major polluting industries — Cedar Key has never had any. Modern waste-water treatment in Levy and Dixie counties has solved the septic tank problem — the last one was shut down in 2001 and commercial oystering has reopened.

Another major advantage that Cedar Key has over most other clam-growing centers is that its shallow bays open directly to the Gulf of Mexico.

“We’re not inside anything here like other places,” Sturmer says. “We’re not locked up in a harbor or sound. We face the Gulf head on, and our water gets constantly refreshed.”

The sea bottom also is perfect for the purpose. Hard-shell clams love muddy seafloors, while other species tend to prefer living in more sand and less mud. Cedar Key is surrounded by a rich mix of marine sediment that offers plenty of ideal growing ground for just about any edible clam species, Sturmer says.

But even with such a bountiful, natural table set for clam growing, Cedar Key’s meteoric rise as a top clam producer would never have been possible without its subtropical climate. Brief, generally mild winters have no lingering effect on Cedar Key’s predominantly warm seawater, a condition that fuels a steady growth of phyto-plankton — clams’ favorite food. Such a luxury is out of reach for huge clamming operations in New England and the Pacific Northwest.

“While those places may be able to plant (baby clams) only a few times a year, and then wait two to three years for them to grow to market size, we can plant year-round and grow them out in as little as 12 to 15 months,” Sturmer says.

The bivalves don’t need any pesticides, herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics or manmade fertilizers of any kind, and they benefit their environments in other ways wherever they live. They grow their calcium carbonate-based shells by using atmospheric carbon dioxide dissolved in the water they live in, thereby trapping a notorious greenhouse gas. And when they’re harvested, loads of potentially pollution-causing nitrogen trapped in their flesh get removed from estuaries.

CEDAR KEY SITS AT THE ECOLOGICAL

EPICENTER OF IDEAL CLAM-GROWING

COUNTRY. IF NATURE EVER CREATED THE

PLACE FOR HAPPY CLAMS, CEDAR KEY

AND ITS ENVIRONS IS IT.

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But clams’ biggest benefit to the environment is their ability to clean the water in which they live. Filter feeders, they constantly strain water, clearing away suspended particles that can block sunlight from reaching seagrasses. Such vegetation is vitally important in the lives of myriad sea creatures, including baby grouper, one of the Gulf ’s most important fish. Research has shown that a two-acre Cedar Key clam farm can filter upwards of 9 million gallons of water a day, Sturmer says.

A big part of Sturmer’s job is to educate seafood companies, consumers and the public in general about the “green” aspects of clam aquaculture.

“This is about as environmentally friendly and as economically feasible as any farming operation gets.”

A MATURE INDUSTRY

Overnight, a cold front has turned the Cedar Key waterfront into a windswept panorama of white caps and pummeled vegetation with a temperature of 38 degrees and a wind chill near freezing.

It’s 10 a.m. and a wet crew of clammers is hurriedly off-loading a full boat at Southern Cross Seafarms, one of the town’s leading clam wholesalers. The men have been on — and in — the icy water since first light.

Holiday season has Southern’s workforce in all-hands-on-deck mode. Sturmer watches as the last of the contents of some 30 muddy bags, each holding upwards of 1,200 clams, gets spilled into plastic bins.

From there, the bins get quickly emptied into tumbling cages mounted on the company’s dock just a few steps away. As the clams fall against themselves, jets of high-pressure water knock off mud and debris. They emerge looking like inch-thick, gold-and-brown gemstones.

Sturmer follows a bin of cleaned clams being rolled into the company’s refrigerated processing house. Five workers hover over a noisy, vibrating machine that is spitting out clams in three streams, sorted by size. Color-coded mesh bags of 100-count each get tied, stacked and moved to a cooler.

“These will soon be on the road to an airport,” Sturmer says, pointing to the stacks. “They’ll be on a dinner plate or in a restaurant by Christmas Day.”

Sturmer is bearing witness to a mature industry whose milestones she’s been a

Cmidwife to for nearly two decades. She has watched as a traditional net-fishing community gradually “got it” about aquaculture, a notion foreign to the locals. She has seen determined, hard-working people master all the tricks of building and running their own hatcheries, raising the “seeds” in nurs-eries, planting and harvesting them correctly, becoming savvy to the often cruel whims of the marketplace — in short doing many of the same things any upland farmer would do to stay in business.

She’s also watched the industry get tested by forces of nature, the market-place and, most recently, human folly. The BP oil disaster in 2010 could have snuffed out Cedar Key’s bright aquaculture candle overnight. But the town dodged that bullet and still, amazingly enough, holds its luck against big storms. Cedar Key hasn’t had a direct hit from a hurricane since an 1896 storm all but obliterated the town. That storm dashed Cedar Key’s dreams of becoming the bustling port that Tampa eventually became, a twist of fate that nonetheless spared its environment for what it enjoys today — a resurging vitality based on exquisitely unsoiled natural resources, something so many other Florida towns lost long ago.

CHEF PETER STEFANI HAS OWNED AND OPERATED CEDAR KEY'S ISLAND ROOM RESTAURANT FOR 22 YEARS AND HAS BEEN A CLAM FARMER SINCE 1998. HE IS A MASTER SUNRAY VENUS CHEF. UF RESEARCHERS ARE INVESTIGATING THE VIABILITY OF INTRODUCING THE

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SUNRAY VENUS

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For more informationwatch UF's

related video

“People here don’t consider them-selves aquaculturists — they’re clam-mers,” Sturmer says. “We’re into our second generation now of clam-farm families, with a third starting to come on. It’s a way of life now, and if we keep doing the right things, I think it’s here to stay.”

Leslie SturmerStatewide Shellfish Extension Agent(352) [email protected]

Related website:http://shellfish.ifas.ufl.edu/

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Krista Vandenborne wheels Sam Hersom into the MRI room as dad Matt Hersom prepares the platform. Sam’s activities are limited by Duchenne muscular dystrophy now, but he told his mother, “In heaven I’m going to do cartwheels and lift weights.”

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PATIENTS

UF RESEARCHERS

TO GIVE MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY

LONGER, FULLER LIVES

TIME

For fifth-graders, birthdays are big deals, and Sam Hersom is no exception. On July 31, 2012, Sam celebrated his 11th birthday with cake

and ice cream, his family and his dog, blowing out candles and enjoying the spotlight.

But that day, Sam also marked a less-joyous milestone. On his 11th birthday, Sam walked for the last time.

Sam has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a particularly severe variety of muscular dystrophy that affects boys. At diagnosis, a clock starts ticking. As the disease progress-

es, muscle function deteriorates, leaving most boys in a wheelchair by middle school and struggling to breathe by their 20s. The heart muscle eventually fails and most Duchenne

patients do not hit the milestones of manhood: college graduation, a first job, a wedding.Researchers at the University of Florida can almost hear the ticking, and are working on

several fronts to develop new strategies to strengthen their frail patients’ muscles so they can live fuller, longer lives.

There is no cure for Duchenne, but in the last 20 years more therapies have shown prom-ise in preclinical studies, including gene transfer, pharmaceuticals and mixtures of the two. But

measuring the effectiveness of these therapies quickly and painlessly in patients has been a chal-lenge, so the Duchenne community is closely watching work by UF researcher Krista Vandenborne

and her colleagues.

Against

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Typically, measuring the efficacy of an experimental treatment strategy has required painful biopsies that harvest muscle tissue with needles, making some parents and boys reluctant to par-ticipate in research, says Vandenborne, chairman of the Department of Physical Therapy in the College of Public Health and Health Professions.

“With surgical biopsies, you’re deal-ing with a 3-centimeter incision, and it’s very hard for the parents to see that you’re taking a piece of their son’s muscle tissue when you’re dealing with a disease where the primary character-istic is the degeneration of the muscle,” Vandenborne says. “To do that multiple times is extremely challenging, very traumatic for the children and families.”

Other measures are less objective. A 5-year-old boy’s assessment of his strength, for example, can depend on whether he is having a good day or a bad day. As costly as clinical trials can be, objective measures of outcome are crucial, Vandenborne says.

In the study funded by a $7.5 mil-lion grant from the National Institutes of Health and in conjunction with Oregon Health and Science University, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, Vanden-borne is investigating magnetic resonance

imaging as a measure of therapies. The approach has two key advantages: first, it is painless, and second, it is an objective, repeatable and quantifiable measurement of a boy’s muscle condition.

Using powerful magnets, the MRI machine can create two- or three-dimen-sional models of the muscles. Normal tissue and damaged tissue give different signals, allowing researchers to assess the severity of muscle damage and changes in it over time.

“There is a lot of excitement in the Duchenne community that several therapeutic strategies have shown a lot of promise in animal models, so there is pressure to move those into clini-cal trials,” Vandenborne says. “MRI is potentially very attractive because it is a good way to see if these therapies result in a change in the disease progression, without a biopsy.”

Vandenborne and her husband, Glenn Walter in the Department of Physiology and Functional Genomics, were recruited to UF in 2001, attracted by the McKnight Brain Institute and UF’s association with the National High

Magnetic Field Laboratory. As the bio-logical arm of the magnet lab, UF has some of the nation’s best MRI facilities.

In the ensuing decade, UF’s Duch-enne research program has grown to cover every facet — from animal models that Walter studies to clinical trials in the College of Public Health and Health Professions.

In recent years, the muscular dys-trophy team at UF has worked closely with pharmaceutical companies to study how drug therapies affect muscle tissue. Barry Byrne, a professor of pediatrics and director of UF’s Powell Gene Ther-apy Center, was involved in a study that found Cialis, a common erectile dys-function drug, could help treat Becker muscular dystrophy, and now Byrne and Vandenborne are planning a study to examine how the drug affects muscle in boys with Duchenne, a more severe form of muscular dystrophy.

UF physical therapy research Assis-tant Professor Sean Forbes is studying whether sildenafil citrate, a similar drug, is therapeutic in animal models of Duchenne.

In Duchenne, healthy muscle atrophies and is replaced with fatty tissue that does not provide support. The image at top left shows the thigh tissue of a healthy boy in contrast to the image below right, which shows the thigh tissue of a boy with Duchenne.

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The UF team also will be monitor-ing the effect of Eteplirsen, a drug that is being tested in 12 boys nationwide for its potential to increase the func-tion of dystrophin proteins that are key to muscle fiber and health. MRI data will help determine whether the experi-mental drug treatment works.

Vandenborne says research into Duchenne is complicated because it is an orphan disease, a rare disease that affects a small population, making it more difficult to get funding and atten-tion. Duchenne is caused by a defective gene for a muscle protein called dystro-phin and is diagnosed in one in 3,500 male children. While that is a lot of boys, research subjects are not as easy to find as in a study, for example, of diabetes.

“In the Gainesville community, there might be five children with Duchenne,” Vandenborne says. “You can’t run a clinical trial with such small numbers, so we are very aggres-sive in recruitment.”

Two years into the study, Vanden-borne says 140 children are enrolled in

the imaging study, some coming from as far away as Spain and Canada to participate.

For the Hersom family, the trip is short. Sam’s dad, Matt Hersom, is a faculty member at UF, and the two have turned the MRI sessions into father-son outings, sometimes with ice cream on the way home to Newberry.

Sam watches a movie while inside the magnet and Matt heads down the hall to do questionnaires with researcher Roxanna Bendixen, who is assessing quality of life issues in Duchenne fami-lies. Bendixen asked Vandenborne to be her mentor on her NIH career develop-ment grant, and has spent the last two summers working at NIH. In a second grant, Bendixen is examining social net-works of boys with Duchenne.

For boys, not being able to partici-pate in physical activities can be socially isolating, Bendixen says, so she is inter-ested in families’ coping strategies.

“I want to know why parents choose to do things or not do things,” says Bendixen, a research assistant profes-sor in the Department of Occupational

Therapy. “Sometimes it’s as simple as ‘Do you have to go up stairs?’ Theme parks can be accommodating, but some-times you can’t get into a convenience store because of a curb.”

School experiences, too, are part of Bendixen’s investigation. She wants to know how parents, students and teach-ers communicate about the disability. Some teachers encourage the boys to participate but others fear injury and become overprotective, she says. One family opted to homeschool after their son was bullied. By middle school, using the restroom becomes an issue, especially if there are two or three stairs to navigate or if a boy needs the teacher’s assistance. Parents report boys going all day without a bathroom break because they are embarrassed to ask for help, Bendixen says, adding “Those stories always break my heart.”

“In late elementary and early middle school, a boy might still have the abil-ity to walk a little, but might be afraid of being knocked down and not being able to get back up. One of the first things these boys lose is the ability to

“RESEARCH INTO

DUCHENNE IS

COMPLICATED BECAUSE

IT IS AN ORPHAN

DISEASE, A RARE DISEASE

THAT AFFECTS A SMALL

POPULATION, MAKING

IT MORE DIFFICULT TO

GET FUNDING AND

ATTENTION.”

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deterio-rate, they are replaced with fat cells that don’t provide support. What hasn’t been studied is whether there is a level of activity that would be therapeutic. Pushing too hard can cause injury, but not exercising enough can cause more atrophy and waste in the muscle.

Lott says he knows parents who limit how many steps their son takes each day; others want their son to run and play as much as possible.

“Parents want to know, ‘What can my child do?’ I can’t tell them what the science says because the science is not out there. We need to figure this out,” Lott says.

In Becker muscular dystrophy, similar to Duchenne but not as severe, adults in a cycling program improved strength and muscle function.

Lott is collaborating with Vanden-borne to determine how the amount of muscle damage relates to the amount of activity a child does at home. Each boy wears an accelerometer 10 hours a day for a week, then mails it back to Lott. The device records a step count and other

get up from the f loor, so they have a scooter,” Bendixen says, “but often you will have a group of kids who will come to their aid.”

For Sam, school is great. He attends Oakview Middle School with many children he has known since kinder-garten. Matt says crossing campus with Sam is heartening: “Everybody is saying ‘Hi Sam, hi Sam.’”

Sam smiles shyly, but admits, “I’ve got a lot of friends.”

The Hersoms try to educate Sam’s class each year. One year, the teacher suggested the kids try walking in her husband’s firefighter boots to get an idea of Sam’s experience. One boy thought it would be no big deal, until he tried it.

“The whole rest of the year, that kid was Sam’s biggest bodyguard,” says Kris Hersom, Sam’s mom. “He realized how hard it was for Sam to move around.”

The Hersom family is like many Duchenne families in another important way, Bendixen says.

“The family unit becomes really close, they do everything together and have a lot of special time they spend at home together and have wonderful family

traditions. An older son who doesn’t have Duchenne may have a ton of friends, but he knows that Friday night is family pizza night and that will never change.”

Sequestering Sam isn’t an option for the Hersoms, Kris says, because it would waste the time he has. Doctors were opti-mistic when Sam was diagnosed 10 years ago, thinking a cure was right around the corner. Now, she says, they participate in research knowing that many of the new therapies will not help Sam.

Donovan Lott, a research assistant professor of physical therapy, says 26 years have passed since the discovery of the genetic defect that causes Duchenne, about the lifespan of a boy diagnosed then. The cure has eluded researchers, but therapies have allowed more boys with Duchenne to grow into men, he says, and he is interested in a therapy that seems counterintuitive: exercise. The MRI studies, he hopes, will allow him to answer a question boys and par-ents always ask: Is exercise good or bad for boys with Duchenne?

The muscle cell in a boy with Duchenne is much more fragile than in a healthy boy, putting many athletic activities off limits. As the muscle cells

“IN LATE ELEMENTARY AND EARLY

MIDDLE SCHOOL, A BOY MIGHT

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A LITTLE, BUT MIGHT BE AFRAID

OF BEING KNOCKED DOWN AND

NOT BEING ABLE TO GET BACK UP.”

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related video

measures of energy expenditure and also allows Lott to see the amount of time the boy spends in activities from sedentary to maximum intensity. Lott hopes to fol-low that study with another in which an exercise chair and a laptop form a home exercise station that could be monitored from campus, allowing researchers to fol-low the boys’ exercise sessions.

MRI would be used to assess the muscles to determine if the exercises remain safe as they increase in intensity, Lott says. The boys also would be asked to rate any pain.

“If we are able to do an exercise, and it shows we can do it safely but it didn’t have enough impact, that in itself is a good finding. If it’s safe, is there

something more we can do since we know it’s not causing harm,” Lott says.

Lott says the Duchenne research at Florida is making a splash, and Vanden-borne credits the pipeline UF has built for Duchenne work. For research to move forward, she says, a critical mass of people is needed to create the next gener-ation of scientists, and Duchenne work at UF includes senior faculty, junior faculty, pre- and post-doctoral researchers, even undergraduate students.

The boys become part of an extended research family, the scientists say. Ben-dixen spoke to Sam’s class at school, Matt Hersom joined Lott in a series of awareness sessions at fraternities. Van-denborne’s and Lott’s sons both served as

healthy control subjects for the research. They exchange holiday cards and remem-ber birthdays. Especially the birthdays.

“On the 15 occasions Matt and I lectured together, I would hear him say, ‘I’m going to bury my son.’ That’s a hard concept to know ahead of time; most parents don’t have that,” says Lott, a father himself. “It does put an urgency into our research. He and his wife have both commented that birthdays are great celebrations, but sad as well because it’s one more birthday closer.”

Krista VandenborneProfessor and Chair, Department of Physical Therapy(352) [email protected]

Donovan LottResearch Assistant Professor, Department of Physical Therapy(352) [email protected]

Roxanna BendixenResearch Assistant Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy(352) [email protected]

Related website:http://pt.phhp.ufl.edu/research/neuromuscular-disease/

“THE MUSCLE CELL IN A BOY WITH

DUCHENNE IS MUCH MORE FRAGILE

THAN IN A HEALTHY BOY, PUTTING

MANY ATHLETIC ACTIVITIES OFF

LIMITS. WHAT HASN’T BEEN

STUDIED IS WHETHER THERE IS A

LEVEL OF ACTIVITY THAT WOULD

BE THERAPEUTIC.”

— DONOVAN LOTT

Donovan Lott helps Tucker Hart into a special chair used in Lott's research on how much exercise is beneficial for boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

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S UF researchers are taking a three-pronged approach to Fighting a potentially devastating citrUs disease

By Kevin Bouffard

scientists at the University oF Florida have a long history of tackling threats to Florida’s signature crop — from freezes to canker.

But when citrus greening — known to scientists as huanglongbing or HLB — was detected in Homestead in 2005, researchers at UF’s world-renowned Citrus Research and Education Center (CREC) in Lake Alfred knew they were in for the fight of their lives.

Greening has devastated citrus crops wherever it has appeared, working its way around the globe from Asia to Africa to South America. The disease slowly weakens and kills all types of citrus trees, and since it can take years before the first symptoms appear, greening has ample time to spread.

Last year UF economists found that between 2006 and 2011 greening had cost the state $4.5 billion in lost eco-nomic output, and 8,257 jobs.

“Citrus greening represents a devas-tating burden on this state’s economy and we’re working around the clock to help,” says Jack Payne, UF’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources.

Effective measures against greening cannot come quickly enough for Florida growers, who are just now beginning to see the damage the disease can do to their groves.

Last fall, Hamlin and other early-season oranges harvested from October to March began falling in unprecedented numbers before harvest.

“Everybody is still shocked with how many Hamlins … fell from the tree,” says Ellis Hunt Jr., a Lake Wales grower and member of the Florida Citrus Commission.

The fate of Valencia oranges, harvested from March to June, does not look much better. In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture changed its projection of pre-mature Valencia drop to “well above average” from “about average” a month earlier.

“It’s the highest drop rate we’ve seen without a weather event,” says Vic Story Jr., a second-generation citrus grower based in Lake Wales, who owns or manages about 5,000 grove acres in Polk and Hardee counties.

“The greening is looking worse all the time. We’re worried more about future years than this year,” adds Jay Clark, a Wauchula grower and member of the Florida Citrus Commission. “What looks alarming right now is these 3- to 5-year-old trees. It looks questionable whether we can grow a young tree to maturity.”

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Citrus Greening

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THE PSYLLID

So it’s no wonder that since the appearance of greening in Florida, researchers with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences have been directing almost all of their significant intellec-tual and financial resources at the disease.

With financial support from the Citrus Research and Development Foundation — a UF direct support organization established with the pro-ceeds from a tax on every box of citrus produced that generates about $5 million annually — scientists at UF and other institutions have pursued a three-pronged approach to combating greening.

First, control the Asian citrus psyllid, the ant-sized insect that transmits the greening bacteria from tree to tree. That offers growers the best hope for immediate results.

Second, understand the bacterium itself, with the goal of neutralizing impact on psyllids or trees.

Third, breed new citrus trees that will tolerate or resist infection.

THE PSYLLID

The psyllid was first detected in two South Florida counties in June 1998. Although at the time it did not carry the greening bacteria, it made establishment of greening more likely if the disease were introduced.

In an attempt to get ahead of the problem, UF entomology Professor Marjorie Hoy and Ru Nguyen, an entomologist with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, went looking for a natural enemy of the psyllid. They found it in a parasitic wasp from Taiwan and Vietnam called Tamarixia radiata. Adult wasps eat some young psyllids and lay their eggs in others. Then the wasp larvae eat the psyllids’ guts from within.

After making sure the wasps would harm only the psyllids, the state began releasing them in 1999.

“Tamarixia radiata is now widely established throughout Florida, feeding on the psyllids and reducing their population by as much as 80 percent in some locations between August and November,” Hoy says.

Michael Rogers

Jacqueline Burns

38 Spring 2013

UF ReseaRch — 3-PRonged aPPRoach1. Control the Asian citrus psyllid.2. Understand the bacteria itself.3. Breed new citrus trees that will tolerate or resist infection.

But the psyllid is a prolific breeder, with each female laying up to 800 eggs and some trees infested with 40,000 bugs, so even an 80-percent kill rate by the wasps is not enough.

That’s why UF entomologist Michael Rogers and his colleagues are seeking a better understanding of the relationship between the psyllid, the bacteria and the tree.

Rogers says he never envisioned he’d be gluing tiny gold wires to the back of insects just 4 millimeters long so he could track their movements.

But when citrus greening was con-firmed in Florida, “We had to shift all our focus to the psyllid,” says Rogers, who estimates that 90 percent of his research since 2005 has involved the psyllid.

Based on Rogers’ research showing that low-volume aerial pesticide spraying was much less expensive than ground spraying, the state convinced growers, including “bad neighbors,” to work together to establish 38 Citrus Health Management Areas (CHMAs) to coordinate the timing and applica-tion of pesticides within a county or region. CHMAs covering 80 percent of Florida’s commercial citrus acreage resulted in a 50-percent reduction in the state’s psyllid population in 2012 compared to the previous year, Rogers says.

Lukasz Stelinski, also an entomolo-gist at the CREC, says another chal-lenge is preventing the psyllids from becoming resistant to pesticides.

“Currently, insecticides are our best tools,” Stelinski says. “We don’t want current levels of resistance to escalate further.”

Stelinski and his colleagues com-pared mortality levels from insecticide exposure in psyllids collected from groves in 2009 and 2010 to psyllids

raised in the lab in isolation and found that the insects were becoming resistant.

Stelinski says the results are proof that resistance management strategies are imperative. These strategies include using different types of insecticides in a rotation and never applying the same chemical twice in a row.

Stelinski also leads research that found that the bacterium responsible for citrus greening causes infected trees to emit a fragrant chemical called methyl salicylate. When psyllids catch a faint whiff of methyl salicylate they interpret it to mean that other psyllids have found a good place to feed. But once they start to feed on an infected tree, they discover that it doesn’t taste quite right.

Unfortunately, even a short feeding session is enough for the insects to suck up the greening bacterium, along with the plant sap they consume, and carry it to the healthy trees.

The good news is that methyl salicy-late is inexpensive and widely available, so it could be used to battle greening. For example, it could be put in traps to monitor groves for the presence of psyllids. Or, it could be released in small amounts throughout a grove to camouflage infected trees’ scent.

The psyllid gives off different signals when it feeds, acquires the greening bacteria or infects the plant, so Rogers and his colleagues have been recording these signals and using them to fine- tune pesticide programs for young citrus trees.

Another challenge of controlling the psyllid is that the insects can travel as much as 1.25 miles in 10 days so any pesticide spraying program has been far ranging and comprehensive.

But some land owners have trees on their property but are not cultivating them and so do minimal or no pesticide spraying. These so-called “bad neigh-bors” negate the efforts of other growers who are spraying.

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Adult wasps eat some young psyllids and lay their eggs in others. Then the wasp larvae eat the psyllids’ guts from within.

Asian Citrus Psyllid

Psyllids lay eggs on shoots and leaves as they emerge from buds. Newly hatched, wingless nymphs feed exclusively on this soft growth as they develop into adults.

THE BACTERIUM

The research is important because the disease has been especially difficult to analyze, says Eric Triplett, chair of UF’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Sciences and lead researcher on the study.

Normally, researchers would capture a sample of bacteria, grow it in a petri dish, then insert it into a healthy tree to see if it causes the disease. But scien-tists have not yet found a way to grow greening bacteria in the lab, which is why its scientific name is Candidatus, meaning it has never been cultured.

UF researchers have also created a mathematical model that predicts how citrus greening is transmitted within an infected tree. The model revealed that once a tree is infected, pesticides may not be enough to halt the dis-ease’s progression. It also showed that removing diseased new growth is not a solution because many shoots may already be infected without exhibiting any symptoms.

Plant pathologist Ariena van Bruggen of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI), who supervised the model’s cre-ation, says having the model is “just a first step,” albeit an important one.

“This model gives us hints about experiments we can do, where to look, where to focus our efforts to solve the problem,” says EPI Director J. Glenn Morris Jr.

Other researchers are looking for genetic material that can neutralize the greening bacteria’s action within the citrus tree. The search began after William Dawson, an eminent scholar

in plant pathology at the CREC, developed a benign citrus

tristeza virus, or CTV, capable of introducing new genetic material into trees.

Dawson and his col-leagues are now testing hundreds of antimicrobial peptides, a class of amino

In addition to pesticides, citrus researchers have just begun an effort to genetically engineer psyllids so they cannot host or transmit the greening bacteria. The scien-tists hope to produce a psyllid biologically incapable of carrying or passing on the greening bacterium, says CREC Director Jacqueline Burns. The insect could then be reared in laboratories and released to mate with wild psyllids, ensuring that the no-transmission trait would spread.

THE BACTERIUM

While researchers like Rogers and Stelinski are focused on the psyllid, their col-leagues are trying to gain a better understanding of the greening bacterium.

One of the first challenges was to determine whether greening was caused by a single species of bacteria or multiple bacteria and/or viral pathogens working together.

Using three types of next-generation genetic analyses, UF researchers examined inner bark from Florida citrus trees infected with citrus greening.

While the team conclusively found the genetic fingerprint of the bacteria com-monly suspected to be behind the disease, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, the analysis showed no other DNA of suspect viral or bacterial pathogens.

“This research tells us that our work, much of which has been focused on Liberi-bacter, is dead on target,” says Burns. “And it gives us confidence to move on with research that helps target this pathogen.”

Along with potential treatments, the genetic analysis could help lead to fast, inex-pensive testing methods that can be early indicators of disease.

Citrus greening

Lukasz Stelinski

THE TREES

Jacqueline BurnsDirector, Citrus Research and Education Center(863) 956-5897 [email protected]

Related website:http://www.crec.ifas.ufl.edu/

E VERY YEAR SAVED IN

THE CITRUS PRODUCTION

CYCLE REPRESENTS A

YEAR OF PRODUCTION

COSTS AND RESOURCES

(WATER, FERTILIZER,

PESTICIDES, ETC.) SAVED.

“

”

acids found in all living organisms, that can be introduced into a citrus tree and undo the harmful effects of the citrus greening bacteria.

“We have a good gun, but we don’t have a good bullet,” Dawson says, adding that if one of the peptides works it would offer an immediate solution.

Dawson’s vector “has already accelerated a lot of research,” says Harold Browning, director of the Citrus Research and Development Foundation. “Many research programs are using it as a gun.”

Dawson’s technology is promising enough that Southern Gardens Citrus Processing Corp., a subsidiary of U.S. Sugar, recently entered into a licensing agreement with the Univer-sity of Florida. In return for financing the approval costs for the technology with federal regulators — which could take three to five years and cost $20 mil-lion to $30 million — Southern Gardens, one of the state’s largest growers with 1.8 million trees on 16,500 acres, would get an exclusive right to the technology and get a share of the royalties when others use it.

THE TREES

A Florida citrus grove may look very different to future generations if growers adopt the Advanced Citrus Production System (ACPS) that IFAS researchers are prototyping on 14 acres in Auburndale with John Strang of Gapway Grove Corp.

ACPS is a collaborative research project among several CREC scientists led by Arnold Schumann, UF associate professor of soil and water science. It seeks to re-engi-neer a citrus grove from the ground up, employing “open hydroponics,” a drip irrigation controlled by soil moisture monitors; intensive “fertigation,” or introducing nutrients through the irrigation system; and high-density plantings with “dwarf” citrus trees that achieve a mature height at around 6 feet, a third as tall as a standard grove.

These smaller trees enabled researchers working at Gapway Groves to plant 363 Hamlin orange trees per acre, about twice the density of today’s standard groves. Planted in 2008, the Gapway Grove trees produced up to 580 boxes of Hamlins per acre in their fourth year, comparable to yields in a mature standard grove, but with a fraction of the water, fertilizer and pesticides. A standard grove takes up to five years to produce a marketable crop and doesn’t achieve maximum production for another several years.

“Every year saved in the citrus production cycle represents a year of production costs and resources (water, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) saved,” according to a CREC report on the Gapway project. “Moreover, every year saved due to accelerated produc-tion helps to offset losses caused by encroaching diseases and potentially earns early returns on the investment.”

William Dawson


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Assian Citrus Psyllid

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Explore 41

42 Spring 2013

Ph.D.

MENT

ORS

Each year the Graduate School recognizes five faculty

members for excellence in mentoring doctoral students

with the Doctoral Dissertation/Mentoring Award.

These five were chosen from more than 200 eligible faculty.

EDWARD CHANDepartment of Oral Biology

College of Dentistry

Edward Chan has been known to get so wrapped up in mentoring his doctoral students that he has forgotten to go home for dinner.

That devotion does not surprise his colleagues.

“It is incredibly rare to find Ed alone, whether in his office, the hall or his lab. Instead, he is usually with a student or a small group of students discussing their data or new findings in the literature,” said Robert A. Burne, associate dean for research in the College of Dentistry.

Burne notes that Chan is so popular that he sits on doctoral committees in five different departments in the Colleges of Dentistry, Medicine and Engineering.

Chan said there “is no simple proto-col for all students. To a great extent, engaging the interest of a student is an art form.” To listen to his students tell it, Chan is a master.

Former student Songqing Li, now a researcher with his wife, another Chan mentee, at St. Jude Children’s Hospital, recalls giving his first conference presen-tation with “hands wet, feet cold.” After training with Chan, he said, he gained confidence and even won the Silver Award in one conference.

“As mentors, it is a fun journey where, with only a few short years, we guide and make a difference to some of the best individuals we will ever work with and, we hope this will create a close bond for years to come,” Chan said.

KARA DAWSONSchool of Teaching & Learning


Former students describe Kara Dawson as a natural mentor, always ready to troubleshoot any problem and quick to offer encouragement.

Wendy Drexler, now director of Online Development at Brown Univer-sity, said she did not realize how special her relationship with her advisor was until her final semester of doctoral work, when she collaborated with doctoral students in other departments.

“It soon became clear that I had a very special advisor who was mentoring me to become a successful future faculty member,” Drexler said.

Drexler said Dawson helped her refine her skills and get exposure for her scholarly work. In fact, Dawson has co-authored more than 25 refereed articles and book chapters with her doctoral students, and all of her doctoral students have presented at conferences.

Dawson said she makes a point of encouraging students to seek the advice and guidance of other faculty members and colleagues, in stark contrast to the historical one-to-one model of the student-mentor relationship.

“I believe students should take full advantage of all the talent and resources around them,” Dawson said.

Elizabeth Bondy, professor and director of the School of Teaching and Learning, said Dawson’s skill as a prob-lem-solver helps her students navigate the challenging terrain of doctoral study.

Explore 43

MICHAEL MARSISKEDepartment of Clinical & Health Psychology

College of Public Health & Health Professions

Michael Marsiske is such an excep-tional teacher that the only years other instructors have won the teaching award in the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology are those in which he recused himself from the competi-tion. He has won his department’s outstanding graduate teaching award six times and outstanding graduate mentor-ship award twice.

Anna Yam, one of three students who nominated Marsiske, said she could “imagine how he might blush over all this praise.” Kelsey Thomas noted that when Marsiske taught her introduc-tory statistics class, he remembered the names of all 40 students by the second class meeting, and remembered them through subsequent courses. Shannon Sisco, now a practicing clinical psychol-ogist, said her most challenging ques-tions often came from Marsiske because “he believed I could think bigger.”

For his part, Marsiske calls working with doctoral students the “fuel in my furnace.”

“Work with doctoral students keeps one’s research current, future-focused, generative, and collegial. There is some-thing exciting about building a team to advance science and scholarship,” said Marsiske, who has served on more than 55 doctoral committees and 27 masters committees.

JACK STENNERSchool of Art & Art History

College of Fine Arts

For Jack Stenner, associate professor of art and technology in the College of Fine Arts, the journey to a doctoral degree or MFA is a path a student and professor walk together.

His students call him mentor, adviser, collaborator, friend and inspira-tion, and their successes are a tribute to his guidance.

Former student Daniel Tankersley, now a professor himself, said of Stenner: “He taught me not about what to do, make, think, learn, or see, but how.”

“Every day in my own classroom, I hear echoes of Jack’s voice in the way I interact with my students,” said Tank-ersley, an assistant professor of art at Western Oregon University.

In the art world, Stenner is known for combining art and technology. He is a co-founder of the Digital Fabrication Laboratory, a collaboration between the School of Art and Art History and the School of Architecture. Stenner has encouraged his students to participate in the world of art and beyond through conferences and exhibitions, resulting in students who are “more world aware than ever,” said Richard Heipp, profes-sor and director of the School of Art and Art History.

“Especially in a field that combines art with emerging technologies that are constantly evolving, it is important for students to realize there is no singular answer; exploration is a goal unto itself,” Stenner said.

BONNIE MORADIDepartment of Psychology

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences

“I feel like I really belong.” One of Bonnie Moradi’s students expressed this sentiment about her sense of commit-ment and belonging to a research career. This testament, especially from an ethnic, minority woman, had a profound effect on Moradi.

“Her sense of belonging in science stays with me, fuels my commitment to mentoring and makes mentoring one of the most meaningful aspects of my work,” said Moradi, a psychology professor whose research is in the field of social stressors, such as prejudice or discrimination.

Although she is just a decade into her own career, Moradi has already been named a distinguished mentor by two national organizations and has former students in academic and clinical posi-tions in psychology. Moradi has shared her expertise and her success, with well over half of her 68 publications and 90 percent of her 100-plus presentations co-authored by her students.

Former student Cirleen DeBlaere, now an assistant professor at Lehigh University, said Moradi often believes in her students more than they believe in themselves.

“Bonnie has what I believe to be a rare ability to meet students where they are when they begin their graduate experience while simultaneously assist-ing them in developing a vision of where it is that they can go,” said DeBlaere.

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Quanqing Hu, a master’s student in electrical and computer engineering, tests a laser and reflectors at the Creativity in the Arts and Sciences Event, known as CASE. The event, sponsored by UF's Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science for Life Program, features science research posters; art exhibits; and film, dance and musical performances. “You have two worlds: art and science. In both worlds creativity is involved. We’re really celebrating the activities of our students from both sides,” said Professor Ben Dunn, director of the Science for Life Program.

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