UMBC Biological Sciences Department
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With more than 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty members and lecturers, UMBC’s Department of Biological Sciences is one of the university’s largest academic departments encompassing a wide breadth of research and teaching. Research faculty in the Biological Sciences focus on:
- Cell Biology
- Computational Biology
- Developmental Biology & Immunology
- Evolutionary Biology
- Molecular Biology & Genetics
- Neuroscience
- Plant Biology
Recent Submissions
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A Role of the FUZZY ONIONS LIKE Gene in Regulating Cell Death and Defense in Arabidopsis
(Nature, 2016-11-29)Programmed cell death (PCD) is critical for development and responses to environmental stimuli in many organisms. FUZZY ONIONS (FZO) proteins in yeast, flies, and mammals are known to affect mitochondrial fusion and function. ... -
Transcriptome analyses reveal SR45 to be a neutral splicing regulator and a suppressor of innate immunity in Arabidopsis thaliana
(BMC, 2017-10-11)Background Regulation of pre-mRNA splicing diversifies protein products and affects many biological processes. Arabidopsis thaliana Serine/Arginine-rich 45 (SR45), regulates pre-mRNA splicing by interacting with other ... -
Signalling requirements for Erwinia amylovora-induced disease resistance, callose deposition and cell growth in the non-host Arabidopsis thaliana
(Wiley, 2017-07-29)Erwinia amylovora is the causal agent of the fire blight disease in some plants of the Rosaceae family. The non-host plant Arabidopsis serves as a powerful system for the dissection of mechanisms of resistance to E. ... -
Coronatine is more potent than jasmonates in regulating Arabidopsis circadian clock
(Nature, 2020-07-30)Recent studies establish a crucial role of the circadian clock in regulating plant defense against pathogens. Whether pathogens modulate host circadian clock as a potential strategy to suppress host innate immunity is not ... -
SALICYLIC ACID SIGNALING NETWORKS
(Frontiers, 2016-02-24) -
Efficient chito-oligosaccharide utilization requires two TonB-dependent transporters and one hexosaminidase in Cellvibrio japonicus
(Wiley, 2021-03-18)Chitin utilization by microbes plays a significant role in biosphere carbon and nitrogen cycling, and studying the microbial approaches used to degrade chitin will facilitate our understanding of bacterial strategies to ... -
Comparing global and local maps of the Caribbean pine forests of Andros, home of the critically endangered Bahama Oriole
(Springer, 2021-11-17)Forest loss is occurring at alarming rates across the globe. The pine rockland forests of Andros, The Bahamas, likely represent some of the largest stands of Bahamian subspecies of Caribbean pine in the world. Given the ... -
Formalizing Phenotypes of Regeneration
(Springer, 2022-04-01)Regeneration experiments can produce complex phenotypes including morphological outcomes and gene expression patterns that are crucial for the understanding of the mechanisms of regeneration. However, due to their inherent ... -
Gamifying Critical Reading through a Genome Annotation Intercollegiate Competition
(ABLE, 2018)This workshop explores the use of a web-based inter-collegiate competition to perform Gene Ontology annotation of gene products in sequenced genomes as a tool to motivate and focus students’ reading and critical ... -
Biocuration: Distilling data into knowledge
(PLOS, 2018-04-16)Data, including information generated from them by processing and analysis, are an asset with measurable value. The assets that biological research funding produces are the data generated, the information derived from these ... -
ECO, the Evidence & Conclusion Ontology: community standard for evidence information
(Oxford University Press, 2019-01-08)The Evidence and Conclusion Ontology (ECO) contains terms (classes) that describe types of evidence and assertion methods. ECO terms are used in the process of biocuration to capture the evidence that supports biological ... -
Origin of the Mobile Di-Hydro-Pteroate Synthase Gene Determining Sulfonamide Resistance in Clinical Isolates
(Frontiers, 2019-01-10)Sulfonamides are synthetic chemotherapeutic agents that work as competitive inhibitors of the di-hydro-pteroate synthase (DHPS) enzyme, encoded by the folP gene. Resistance to sulfonamides is widespread in the clinical ... -
Quality Matters: Biocuration Experts on the Impact of Duplication and Other Data Quality Issues in Biological Databases
(Elsevier, 2020-04)Biological databases represent an extraordinary collective volume of work. Diligently built up over decades and comprising many millions of contributions from the biomedical research community, biological databases provide ... -
Complete Genome Sequence of the Streptomyces-Specific Bacteriophage BRock
(ASM, 2020-08-27)The complete genome sequence of the unique virulent bacteriophage BRock, isolated from compost on Streptomyces sp. strain SFB5A, was determined. BRock is a myovirus with a 112,523-bp genome containing a GC content of 52.3%. ... -
Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals
(Frontiers, 2020-09-23)Corals’ obligate association with unicellular dinoflagellates, family Symbiodiniaceae form the foundation of coral reefs. For nearly a century, researchers have delved into understanding the coral-algal mutualism from ... -
Crowdsourcing biocuration: The Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies (CACAO)
(PLOS, 2021-10-28)Experimental data about gene functions curated from the primary literature have enormous value for research scientists in understanding biology. Using the Gene Ontology (GO), manual curation by experts has provided an ... -
Automatic Generation of Interactive Multidimensional Phase Portraits
Mathematical models formally and precisely represent biological mechanisms with complex dynamics. To understand the possible behaviors of such systems, phase portrait diagrams can be used to visualize their overall global ... -
A fusion of the Bacteroides fragilis ferrous iron import proteins reveals a role for FeoA in stabilizing GTP-bound FeoB
(Elsevier, 2022-03-08)Iron is an essential element for nearly all organisms, and under anoxic and/or reducing conditions, Fe²⁺ is the dominant form of iron available to bacteria. The ferrous iron transport (Feo) system is the primary prokaryotic ... -
Genomic Sequence and Characteristics of EmiRose, a Bacteriophage Isolated on Corynebacterium flavescens
(ASM, 2022-03-02)Bacteriophage EmiRose is a siphovirus infecting Corynebacterium flavescens. The EmiRose genome is 37,431 bp long and composed of 47 protein-coding genes. Based on gene content similarity, EmiRose is not closely related to ... -
Female song is structurally different from male song in Orchard Orioles, a temperate-breeding songbird with delayed plumage maturation
(Journal of Field Ornithology, 2022)Female birds in many temperate species are thought to sing reduced or quieter songs and appear to sing less often than their male counterparts. Therefore, female song may be easily overlooked. Increasingly, researchers are ...