Lifelong Learning Online Catalog

In this seminar current research is presented by invited speakers of university of Michigan researchers. All seminars will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday in M1152 SPHII, except when noted otherwise. Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:00 p.m. in room M4034, the Biostatistics conference room. For more information email wmashbur@umich.edu.

This lecture is part of the Kresge Hearing Research Institute. This institute is associated with the University of Michigan Health Care System. This talk is part of the Hearing, Balance, and Chemical Senses Seminar Series. Unless stated otherwise all meetings are at 3:45 PM Thursdays in Danto Auditorium. The seminar series organizer for Fall Semester 2011 is W. Michael King and for the 2012 Winter Semester is David Kohrman.

2012's Henry Russel Lecturer, a title given each year to a U-M professor in recognition of exceptional achievements in research, scholarship and/or creative endeavors, is Scott, considered one of the foremost Latin American historians in the country. Her work examines the intersection of law and history in the study of slavery and emancipation.

Bhattacharya started his research work in marine ecology and has over the years shifted his lab’s interests to genomics and bioinformatics. His group studies endosymbiosis, single cell genomics, phylogenomics, harmful algal blooms, with a focus on dinoflagellates, and more recently algal biofuels. Models for research include Chlamydomonas, the photosynthetic amoeba Paulinella that has an independent plastid origin, and the glaucophyte alga Cyanophora paradoxa for which his group has recently completed a genome sequence. In this talk, Bhattacharya will present work in his lab using a potentially transformational approach to marine genomics and ecology referred to as single cell genomics (SCG). Although relatively well established with prokaryotes, SCG has only recently been applied to the more complex genomes of eukaryotes. Working with collaborators at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science, SCG methods were used to generate draft genome assemblies from individual picobiliphyte (bacterial-sized planktonic protists) cells captured in the ocean. In contrast with the recent description of this phylum as photosynthetic, no evidence was found of plastid DNA nor of nuclear-encoded plastid-targeted proteins, which suggests that these picobiliphytes are heterotrophs. Genome data from one cell were dominated by sequences from a widespread single-stranded DNA virus, which was absent from the other two cells. These latter two cells however contained non-eukaryote DNA derived from marine Bacteroidetes and large DNA viruses that presumably are prey items. Therefore, our shotgun sequencing approach to uncultured marine protists revealed distinct interactions of individual cells. Generally, SCG offers the possibilityto gain access not only to the native DNA of cells but also to the DNAs of prey, symbionts, and pathogens associated with each cell. This seminar will also discuss SCG work with the Paulinella model that has begun to uncover the connections between phagotrophy, horizontal gene transfer (HGT), and primary plastid endosymbiosis. Ultimately, it may be possible to reconstruct HGT events at the level of individual cells and populations in nature.

Suzanne Buffam is the author of two collections of poetry, The Irrationalist, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Past Imperfect, which won the Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 2005. She teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. Robert Fernandez is the author of We Are Pharaoh (2011) and Pink Reef (forthcoming). He is the recipient of awards from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry. He was recently named a New American Poet by the Poetry Society of America. UMMA is pleased to be the site for the Department of English Program in Creative Writing Zell Visiting Writers Series, which brings outstanding writers each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from UM alumna Helen Zell ('64). For more information, please see www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp.

This lecture is offered by the University of Michigan A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. All lectures will start at 6 p.m. in the college auditorium unless otherwise noted. Additional information to come.

Join us as we welcome Shane Harris, who discusses the threats and challenges that will define America’s national security in the 21st century. An author and journalist, Shane Harris has spent the last decade writing about national security and counterterrorism. He is the author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State,” voted one of 2010’s Best Books by The Economist. Shane Harris, winner of the 24th annual Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, is Senior Writer for the Washingtonian, “the magazine that Washington lives by.” Free Admisson, open seating; reception follows program.

Participants experiencing this travel destination will have the opportunity to explore the major monuments of Egyptian antiquity with an expert Egyptologist, watch the sunrise over the temples at Abu Simbel aboard a deluxe cruise ship on Lake Nasser, spend three nights cruising the lower Nile from Aswan to Luxor, and discover Alexandria’s Greco-Roman heritage at the Library of Alexandria and the tri-level catacombs in Kom el-Shoukafa.

Dean Malmgren is co-founder and managing partner of Datascope Analytics LLC. As an author of several peer-reviewed publications on big data analytics and visualization, Dean is excited about bringing cutting-edge techniques out of research and into practice. When not teasing himself of others, Dean can be found swimming, cycling, or running for silly long distances. Dean received his BS in math and chemical engineering from the University of Michigan and a PhD in chemical engineering from Northwestern University.

"The diffusion of Twin Arginine Translocation complexes in bacterial membranes is substrate and membrane- potential dependent" Siet van den Wildenberg, Felix Oswald, Kah Wai Yau, Holger Lill, Erwin Peterman and Yves Bollen The twin arginine translocation (Tat) system transports fully folded proteins across the inner membrane of bacteria. The energy for translocation is provided by the electrochemical gradient across the inner membrane, called proton motive force. The Tat system is located in the inner membrane and consists of three essential components, TatA, TatB and TatC. TatA is the most abundant Tat protein and is thought to be responsible for pore formation, whereas TatB and TatC together are believed to form a receptor complex, which recognizes and binds to the substrate proteins. We aim to unravel the working mechanism of the Tat system by using fluorescence microscopy. Various components of the system have been fluorescently labelled by genetic fusion to GFP or the red variant mCherry. Fluorescent protein complexes are imaged while they diffuse in the membrane, and data are analyzed in terms of displacement and intensity. Computer simulations are used to better understand the data obtained. We found that the diffusion of the complexes depends on the presence of a substrate and on the membrane potential. "How flavin affects local protein unfolding and associated stability is surprisingly complex" Yves Bollen, Adrie Westphal, Simon Lindhoud, Willem van Berkel and Carlo van Mierlo Binding of cofactors stabilizes proteins against global unfolding. However, how cofactors affect local unfolding and associated stability, and thus protein functionality, is poorly understood. We used H/D exchange followed by NMR to explore local unfolding events in a 179-residue flavodoxin, and were able to pinpoint the residues in the protein that are responsible for its picomolar binding affinity.