Department of Biology
The Department of Biology offers exceptional opportunities to learn, work, and collaborate across levels of biological organization and styles of research. Faculty research interests span the complete spectrum of biological phenomena and disciplines, from biochemistry to global environmental change. This breadth of research interests has led to development of three focused, yet overlapping, graduate training programs: Molecular, Cellular, and Evolutionary Biology (MCEB), Ecology Evolution and Organismal Biology (EEOB), and Microbial Biology.
News
MEASURING CO2 TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING
May 14, 2012 – If the world’s nations ever sign a treaty to limit emissions of 
climate-warming carbon dioxide gas, there may be a way to help verify compliance: a new method developed by scientists from the University of Utah and Harvard.
Using measurements from only three carbon-dioxide (CO2) monitoring stations in the Salt Lake Valley, the method could reliably detect changes in CO2 emissions of 15 percent or more, the researchers report in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the week of May 14, 2012.“The primary motivation for the study was to take high-quality data of atmospheric CO2 in an urban region and ask if you could predict the emissions patterns based on CO2 concentrations in the air,” says study coauthor Jim Ehleringer, a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Utah. See full story... SL Tribune Article
Genes for Learning, Remembering, Forgetting
March 29, 2012 – Certain genes and proteins that promote growth and 
development of embryos also play a surprising role in sending chemical signals that help adults learn, remember, forget and perhaps become addicted, University of Utah biologists have discovered. “We found that these molecules and signaling pathways [named Wnt] do not retire after development of the organism, but have a new and surprising role in the adult. They are called back to action to change the properties of the nervous system in response to experience,” says biology Professor Andres Villu Maricq, senior author of the new study in the March 30 issue of the journal Cell. See full story...
The Key To Keeping Lice At Bay? A Lot Of Hot Air
April 6, 2012 by STEVE HENN-NPR News. When Dale Clayton's kids were little, 
they — like millions of others — got lice, and Clayton spent weeks combing and picking and shampooing to get them out. "Even then it was already pretty well known that lice were evolving resistance to many of the shampoos that are available in drugstores and grocery stores and so on," says Clayton, so he made it his mission to build a better louse trap. See full story with audio and video...
Biology Professor Proposes Wildlife Corridor
March 5, 2012 Kars, Turkey - "This is an Armenian plot," mutters a farmer as ecologists 
explain what may be Turkey's most ambitious wildlife conservation project ever, right in his backyard.
But in fact, the government is behind it. This summer, officials expect to begin the reforestation of a 58,000-acre corridor of land that will connect the isolated Sarikamis National Park and its shrinking population of wolves, bears, and lynxes to a swath of territory in the Caucausus . "This is the biggest landscape-scale active conservation project ever undertaken in the country," says Cagan Sekercioglu, a professor of biology at the University of Utah who proposed the corridor. "We're hoping this will reduce human-predator contact and encourage these animals to access much larger and more resource-rich forests along the Black Sea and Caucasus. See full story...
