Radiobio

You and I .... are completely different.... Not just because we like different music or have different parents, but because we are more than individuals. We contains multitudes of microbial communities and, believe it or not, my community is different than yours. Today, we are talking with Dr. Kathryn Milligan-Mhyre about her research into how microbes associate with hosts and how those microbes change over time

Do you grow your own food or butcher your own meat? Many of us don't. We get our food from a lot of different places in our modern society and we have a global network of food import and export. But what happens when there is contamination in our food supply? How do we know where the contamination is coming from when our food is coming from all over the place? Join us as we find out how we can use genomic data to explore this issue in this episode of RadioBio.

Have you ever thought about how weird hybrids actually are? Some hybrids seem to be a contradiction: they can't reproduce! How could nature allow this? Today we discuss the evolutionary conflict of speciation, hybrids, and sterility.

Have you ever thought about how light affects your behavior on a day to day basis? Now think about how light would affect you on a molecular scale? Molecules have a direct influence on behavior from sleep cycles to depression and motivation. Today we discuss molecules, how they affect animal behavior, and the origins of such an intimate relationship in molecular biology.

It's getting warmer and drier, but there may be an untapped natural resource that can offer fresh water: fog! Fog is more than just one way your beach day can be ruined-- Coastal fog has the potential to be a major contributor to future sustainable agricultural practices. Today we discuss fog and its impact on crops in California.

This week is a special edition of RadioBio, put on for UC Merced's International Education Week. In this episode, we hear from five different researchers and their unique experiences with international research: Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, Dr. Felipe Zapata, Dr. Gregory Mutumi, Dr. Samuel Wasser, and Dr. Teamrat Ghezzehei. From soil science to conservation biology to everything in between! Each story highlights the various ways we can be inspired by the world around us, and how science reaches beyond physical and political boundaries. Join us, as listening to life, goes international!

What is a virus? Why are they important? Viruses can cause disease and mortality, and they also significantly influence ecosystem ecology and environmental chemistry. Today we discuss viruses and their role in biogeochemical cycles and agricultural systems with Dr. Joanne Emerson from UC Davis.

Here's a riddle for you, what is something that stays behind in an environment after an animal is long gone? The answer is... POOP! What if we could use poop to study animals that would otherwise be difficult to track down? Well, Dr. Sam Wasser does just that. This week on Radiobio, we talk with Dr. Wasser from the University of Washington about how he uses poop to better understand animal populations with implications from tracking poachers to tracking whales.

Matter in a random universe. How does it behave? Can we predict it? When physics meets biology, this intersection between two disciplines can crack some major gaps in our understanding of how matter transforms from one state to another. Today we discuss proteins that change their physical state and the theory that goes into understanding this state change.

Water. It is one of the basic requirements of life as we know it, especially in California. The Washoe people of California's Sierra Nevada mountains believe that all water bodies contain water spirits known as water babies that dictate if you will catch fish or if the river will run dry. And these beliefs are founded in the reality of water's significance...the Sierra Nevada mountains are the reservoir of California, with more than 60% of the state's water originating in the mountains. Our history, our economy, our entire being is tied to how much water falls on these mountains. But what happens...when the water stops? Today, Kinsey Brock, Morgan Quail, and I, Jeff Lauder, speak with a hydrologist and three ecologists about what made the 2012-2016 drought so historic, and how studying its impacts on forest ecosystems can help us understand what a changing climate means for California.

How do you search for a virus? Even worst, how do you search for a virus's DNA? A virus you've never seen before and have no clue what it looks like! If you think of one of your cells as the size of a baseball stadium, a virus would about the size of a baseball. You could try a targeted approach by sequencing your best, educated guesses but with metagenomics you can sequence everything but the kitchen sink. This week we talk small viruses and big data with Dr. Eric Delwart.

Imagine a world with no leaders. No Presidents. No generals. No bosses. No central control. Ants have successfully occupied every continent on earth and even though they have a queen, they use a system with no central control which we term collective behavior. But what is collective behavior? How do we begin to understand behaviors that emerge in a spontaneous way? Dr. Deborah Gordon, Professor of biology at Stanford University, joined us to talk all about collective behavior in ants.

Have you ever wondered what powers us? We all consume food for energy, but HOW does that actually turn into energy?  You may be familiar with the molecule ATP, or adenosine triphosphate. ATP is used to store energy from the breakdown of food, and through a process called hydrolysis, that energy can be released and transferred to power reactions. This tiny but mighty molecule is what powers nearly every reaction in our cells. In this episode, we journey inside the cell as we learn more about this powerful molecule, and the specialized structure inside the cell where its made, the mitochondria.

"The thymus is a really ugly-looking organ, but tastes fantastic. Have you ever had sweet breads?" In case you don't know, sweetbread is the culinary term for the thymus, but what is the thymus, besides a tasty dish? In this episode Genevieve and Stephen sit down with Dr. Jarrod Dudakov and discuss what the thymus is, its function, and why it is worth researching.

When you are thinking about how the world works, how often do you think about the tiny forces of nature? Just about never, what do you mean? I mean microbes! They play an important role in ecosystem processes such as decomposition and nutrient cycling. But what do we know how these microbes live in nature? It turns out they live in communities, just like we humans do. In this episode we talk with Dr. Jennifer Martiny from UC Irvine about her work with microbial communities.

A lot of people don't like bats, even Batman is afraid of them. But maybe people are just afraid of what they don't know. Today Dr. Greg Mutumi talks to us about what makes bats so unusual, interesting, and, like he said earlier....cute!

Do you think you can put a number on the amount of species you've seen in your life? Absolutely not. Just stepping out onto the city street, there are countless species around us at all times. It's a huge amount of biodiversity. But what does that even mean and how do we study it? This week on RadioBio, we are joined by Dr. Felipe Zapata from University of California Los Angeles to discuss just that.

Symbioses, the interactions between two different species, make the world go ‘round. Everything from our agricultural systems to our own gut depends on groups of interacting organisms doing their thing. Our guest today, Dr. Alison Hansen, studies how a common aphid gets its nutrition. It turns out that its entire diet is dependent on a bacterium living inside each and every aphid. But how did it get there? What does it do for the aphid? Let’s dive into the big world inside small insects.

We often imagine a cell as a large balloon filled with jelly, but really it is more like a large city. Packages need to go from one place to the other in an organized fashion as to not disrupt other processes. For example, when we need an item, we go to the store or click away on retail websites, but how do these items find their way to the retail place or our house? There are vehicles on roads and highways that are utilized for distribution. Much like the infrastructure that we use everyday to move cargo around our cities, the cell has its own system to deliver goods from one place to another. What are the 18 wheelers of the cell, how do they move such important packages, and how do they know where to go? Cytoplasmic dynein is a protein complex that transports molecular cargo along and plays a key role in the intracellular trafficking network. Dr. Danielle Grotjahn utilizes specialized imaging techniques to study these structures and the function of motor proteins.

What if you could prevent something bad from happening? When it comes to epilepsy, you never know when a seizure could happen next. The ability to predict an incoming seizure can be a game changer. Today we have the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Jeanne Paz about her incredible work aimed at seizure prediction and prevention.