Thesis wealth
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| Sleep of the frogs ... Ms Symonds is studying hibernation patterns |
Research higher degree students at UQ continue to produce startling results which make substantial contributions to The University's research publication output and overall profile.
• Ever wondered why shells look as good as they do? University of Queensland researcher, Dr Daniel Jackson, may have found the answer. In a collaboration between UQ’s School of Integrative Biology and the University of Göttingen in Germany, Dr Jackson has discovered a gene found in the tropical abalone that controls the striking blue and red colours found in the mollusc’s shell.
“This is the first gene shown to play a role in molluscan shell patterning,” Dr Jackson said. “This gene is also distantly related to a gene family found in vertebrates, of which humans are a member, so it provides insight into how the evolutionary process can create new roles for old genes.” He made the discovery while working on the genetics of how shells are made in abalone, something he describes as an amazing process.
“We estimate that more than 25 percent of the genes expressed in the shell-secreting tissue of the abalone are involved in shell formation,” he said. “Most mollusc shells are basically made of chalk (calcium carbonate) with a little protein thrown in making them incredibly strong. “No human-made calcium carbonate based material can come close to this, so to be able to replicate this would have wide applications in materials, medical and dental science.”
Dr Jackson was recently honoured at the BioMed Open Access Research awards in London for his PhD and postdoctoral work. He is a member of Professor Bernie Degnan’s lab, which focuses on evolutionary developmental biology as well as the marine and aquaculture biotechnology of marine invertebrates such as abalone, sponges, scallops and crustaceans.
• UQ Business School PhD student, April Wright, was stumped when she first started investigating the relatively recent English county cricket practice of importing overseas players. While she had planned to analyse the practice as a strategy for generating spectator interest and skills transfer in internationalised sports, when she began conducting interviews at county cricket clubs she soon realised it was more complicated than that.
“I was struck by the paradox inherent between county cricket’s traditions and the modern demands of sport as commercial entertainment,” she said. Her research took her deep into the archives of Marylebone Cricket Club at the legendary Lord’s Cricket Ground where she combed minutes of meetings and original documentary records from 1937 to the late 1960s. She said she found a complex relationship between cricket’s traditional ideology and the economic rationalism necessary for the financial sustainability of county clubs in modern times.
“In Victorian England, first-class county cricket became an institutional carrier for English moral character,” she said. “The expression ‘it’s not cricket’ as a way of describing unacceptable behaviour in daily life is a classic illustration of the moral authority of the cricketing code at that time. “However, the structures and practices adopted by the county clubs changed substantially in the post-war period.
“New practices such as importing foreign players – which contradicted the ideology of cricket as a game for ‘English gentlemen’ and ‘amateurs’ – somehow became incorporated into the institution of first-class county cricket.” As well as scouring the documents, Ms Wright also conducted interviews and observations at three county clubs to understand contemporary practices. She said she found that the modern market logic of sport as business continued to challenge English cricket’s traditional moral ideology. “It’s an ongoing struggle between cultural capital and economic capital in defining what county cricket should be,” she said.
• A marine weed native to Moreton Bay is overgrowing waterways around Australia, in California, and throughout the Mediterranean Sea. The plastic-like weed called Caulerpa taxifolia, invades naturally occurring seagrass and is only eaten by an uncommon slug that can tolerate its toxins.
Waterway and environmental authorities in Australia, Europe and the United States have tried removing and killing Caulerpa with chlorine, copper sulphate, salt, and by hand. In 2000, Caulerpa covered 131,000 hectares throughout the Mediterranean Sea, much of which was once home to a diverse plant community, including seagrass. Attempts to eradicate the weed, which thrives in polluted water, have been expensive with the South Australian government spending about $6 million and New South Wales about $500,000 on its removal.
UQ PhD student, Dana Burfeind, is studying the weed to understand more about how it grows to produce a model predicting how far and how quickly it can spread and how that will impact fish communities. Ms Burfeind, who is studying through UQ’s Centre for Water Futures in the School of Engineering, said many authorities were still trying to settle on the best way to stop the weed’s spread, with its introduction blamed largely on the aquaria trade.
• A rare Australian frog that burrows underground for a summer siesta resurfaces more than nine months later in just as good shape as before its rest. Long hibernations usually waste mammal and amphibian muscles, but the green-striped burrowing frog is an exception.
UQ PhD student and zoology research assistant, Beth Symonds, has shown this frog’s muscles were unaffected during its subterranean break to avoid the summer sun and dehydration. She found that muscle contraction speed slowed slightly but the frog retained its power, muscle mass and muscle fibres after waking.
“If you immobilised a person for nine months, he or she wouldn’t even be able to walk,” she said. She is now collecting data on three enzymes in the frog’s muscle tissue to understand how it preserves energy. She said it would take more research to explain exactly how the green-striped burrowing frog maintained its muscles after its big sleep.
Weed control ... Ms Burfeind at work in Moreton Bay
Howzat ... Ms Wright is investigating county cricket
About abalone ... Dr Jackson is interested in the genes
behind shell colour
