Biological Sciences

Stress responses of Escherichia coli and their role in pathogenesis. Genetic, molecular biological and biochemical approaches are used to identify and characterize regulatory pathways involved in responding to stresses to the bacterial envelope that may be encountered either in the environment or during an infection.

DNA polymerase function and DNA replication are studied using yeast as a model system for in vivo studies and the bacteriophage T4 DNA polymerase as a model for in vitro studies. Expertise in DNA polymerase function is being applied to the development of new DNA sequencing methods. Genetic, biochemical and molecular biological techniques are used.

My research is in two main areas: population dynamics of insects, and ecology of foraging by insect parasitoids. Research emphasizes the impact of habitat structure on population processes such as fecundity, mortality and insect movement, and is aimed at understanding dynamics at the landscape (regional) level. Current projects are: 1) Effect of forest fragmentation on the dynamics of the forest tent caterpillar and its natural enemies, 2) Effect of size and isolation of alpine meadows on dynamics of butterfly populations, and 3) Effect of habitat structure on willow-gall insects (and their parasitoids) in prairie pothole communities.

Vascular pattern formation and vascular differentiation in plants using a strategy that combines molecular genetics and genomics with cell biology. This approach includes: (1) the generation and use, in different genetic backgrounds, of fluorescently tagged markers of vascular cell states, cell polarity and subcellular components; (2) the identification of genes by mutant vascular phenotype, and their subsequent isolation and analysis at the molecular level; (3) the identification of genes with preferential or exclusive expression in the vascular tissues by whole-genome oligonucleotide microarray, and the isolation and characterisation of insertional mutants in these genes.

Research interests include ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry and experimental ecology, with special reference to boreal, alpine and subalpine, and arctic or subarctic lakes and watersheds.

Ecology of helminth parasites. Two areas of emphasis are the tolerance of free-living stages to environmental conditions, and the interactions between larval parasites and their hosts. Current interests are field studies in Alberta of trematodes in freshwater snails and Schistocephalus tapeworms in sticklebacks, and lab studies of Hymenolepis tapeworms in Tribolium beetles.

Insect systematics with interests in molecular evolution, population genetics, biodiversity and conservation. Emphasis on speciation in swallowtail butterflies and spruce budworm moths. Also insect pest complexes, phylogeny reconstruction, taxonomy, plant-insect interactions, forensic entomology and internet-accessible faunal inventories.

The goal of my research is to understand the regulation of microtubule polymer assembly and how microtubules build intracellular structures such as the mitotic spindle in vivo. Like most complex 4-dimensional biological processes, a complete understanding of spindle assembly will require knowledge of the properties of individual components as well as an appreciation for how their assembly is orchestrated in living cells. C. elegans is an ideal system in which to do this, due to the ease of analysing gene function via RNAi, genetics, biochemistry, and in vivo imaging.

Interests in behavioural ecology, evolutionary ecology and conservation biology; past work on seabird ecology; current focus on movement behaviour by birds and mammals in fragmented habitats as part of a broader program that integrates the field of behavioural ecology with conservation issues.

Whole-ecosystem Experimentation, Biogeochemical Cycling, Reservoir Impact Studies, Greenhouse Gases, Methylmercury Bioaccumulation, Limnology, Wetland Ecology, Ecotoxicology, Avian Ecology.

Interactions among hormones, pheromones, and reproductive behaviors in fish. Our finding that many fish use released hormones (steroids and prostaglandins) as potent and specific sex pheromones makes possible a wide range of studies on pheromone evolution and function. A long term interest is to describe the nature and distribution of hormonal pheromones among the cypriniform fishes, especially the southeast Asian cyprinids (carps, minnows), to develop a broad understanding of species specificity, and how hormonal pheromones function in signaling and reproductive isolation. More specific goals are to understand the physiological mechanisms underlying endocrine and behavioral responses to hormonal pheromones, and how these responses are influenced by the receiver\'s endocrine status.

My primary research goal is to further develop channel catfish as an immunological model system for studying the evolution and function of innate immune receptors. Specifically, I will functionally characterize a novel family of immunoregulatory receptors termed channel catfish Leukocyte Immune-Type Receptors (IpLITRs). Catfish are one of the few fish species for which a viable in vitro culture system has been developed and the only fish species from which clonal and functionally distinct leukocyte cell lines (i.e. B cells, T cells, macrophages, and Natural Killer (NK) cells) can be readily generated. The availability of these cell lines allows for the study of cellular immune responses in ways not possible with any other ectothermic vertebrate. Therefore, I am in an excellent position to further develop the channel catfish as a model system to understand the functional and molecular evolution of innate immune receptors that participate in the regulation of anti-viral and anti-tumor immune responses.

Physiology, genomics, and ecology of nitrification and denitrification.
Influence of microbial metabolism on greenhouse gas production.

We are interested in examining host-pathogen interactions in order to understand and exploit virulence mechanisms used by bacteria colonizing mucosal surfaces. Campylobacter jejuni, a leading cause of bacterial food poisoning worldwide, provides an exciting model system for our studies. My research group has been characterizing campylobacter glycosylation systems including the first identified bacterial N-linked protein glycosylation pathway (see image below) and the extremely variable capsular polysaccharides, that have been demonstrated to play important roles in chicken colonization, bacteriophage evasion and diarrheal disease. Analytical technologies such as high resolution magic angle spinning (HR-MAS) NMR, proteomics and microarrays coupled with representative model systems are being used for the identification of novel virulence determinants, gene and protein expression profiling, and elucidation of regulatory networks.

Plant Physiology and Functional Genomics. My research focuses on understanding the mechanisms plants use to tolerate abiotic stresses in the soil environment, such as metal toxicity and nutrient deficiency. We currently have three overlapping research directions: (1) adaptation of plants to acidic soils, focusing on the primary growth-limiting factors aluminum toxicity and phosphate deficiency; (2) regulation of trace element, particularly cadmium, accumulation and transport in plants; and (3) functional characterization of P_1B-type heavy-metal ATPase transporters in Brachypodium distachyon. We use techniques of cell and molecular biology, comparative genomics, bioinformatics, and whole-plant physiology to study how model systems (Arabidopsis, Brachypodium, yeast) and agronomically important crops (wheat, canola, rice) respond to abiotic stress at the molecular, cellular, and whole-plant levels.

Human-mediated environmental changes affect biological responses across all organizational levels. Understanding how changes at lower levels, such as protein responses, relate to higher level, more ecologically relevant responses such as behavior, is the overarching objective of this lab. A specific goal is to determine how contaminants mechanistically alter the behavior of at risk and otherwise valuable fish species in our impacted aquatic ecosystems.

My research, and that of my students, focuses on the ecology of fishes and the organisms with which they interact, in boreal and arctic lakes and streams, addressing the general question: what factors of the northern environment affect the ecology of fishes at the individual, population and community levels? Laboratory and field experiments are combined with broad-scale comparisons in studies of community organization, population dynamics and life history.

- Alpine, Arctic, and Boreal Ecology - Freshwater Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function - Cumulative Impacts of Global Change on Aquatic Ecosystems - Stress and Ecosystem Recovery - Land-Water Linkages

Neuronal disorders arguably represent one of the least understood classes of human disease, owing largely to the complexity of the vertebrate nervous system. Many neuronal disorders (blindness, decreased IQ, deafness, and palsies) are attributable to aberrant developmental processes. During embryogenesis, proper nervous system development depends on a critical balance between cell proliferation, differentiation and apoptosis. To derive insight into nerve formation, my laboratory studies zebrafish cranial neuron differentiation and retinal ganglion cell patterning and survival.

PhD (Molecular Biophysics), Yale University, 1991. Professor, Depts. of Computing Science, Biological Sciences and the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Alberta. Dr. Wishart is the holder of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Chair in Protein Chemistry and in 2003 was cross-appointed as a research scientist with the NRC\'s National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT). He is a co-founder of BioTools Inc. (a bioinformatics company) and Chenomx Inc. (a metabonomics company), both of which are located in Edmonton. Dr. Wishart is also a co-founder of the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops - a national bioinformatics training program that has been in operation since 1999. Additionally, Dr. Wishart has served as the chair of the Canadian Proteomics Initiative (CPI) conference for the past 3 years. Dr. Wishart\'s research interests lie in 1) the development of bioinformatics software, 2) the modelling of biological systems, 3) structural proteomics and 4) the application of NMR spectroscopy to drug discovery. He is currently supervising 18 students, staff and post-doctoral fellows. Since 1990 he has published nearly 100 papers on a variety of topics ranging from gene prediction, metabolomics, structural proteomics, NMR spectroscopy and cancer detection.

Professor Wong is jointly appointed in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Medicine. He is also Associate Director of the Beijing Genomics Institute and a Guest Professor in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The unifying theme behind his research is the relentless improvement in our ability to acquire molecular biology data at lower costs. His two biggest programs are in plant sequencing and in viral metagenomics. In the first instance, he is leading an international consortium to collect gene sequence information for 1000 plant species. In the second instance, he is partnered with medical doctors at the University of Alberta to develop novel methods to identify pathogens in clinical samples. In all cases, enormous quantities of data are collected for these projects, and hence computational analysis plays a central role. Development of algorithms that deal with the practicalities of these data sets is another component of his research. Prospective graduate students and postdoctoral fellows MUST be fluent in mathematics and computational analysis, as well as in biology.