Biological Sciences

Every year, the College of Arts and Sciences recognizes exemplary staff members and their vital contributions to our mission and vision. Congratulations to our three awardees for 2018:

A team of researchers from Washington State University and the University of Idaho has received a $50,000 grant from the USDA Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grants Program to organize a national conference in Washington, D.C., on the compositions of bovine and human milk. “Human milk is the only food ever designed by nature […]

Luana Lins, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences, is fresh off a month-long visit studying polar organisms as part of the National Science Foundation’s Training Program in Antarctica for Early-Career Scientists. When she wasn’t counting bacteria or extracting the DNA of pteropods, Lins was visited by penguins, watched whales, and toured the […]

When Omar Cornejo got his genomic analysis back from 23andMe, he and his wife, fellow population geneticist Joanna Kelley, were both a bit surprised and vindicated. Venezuelan, Cornejo expected to see the alleles, or variations of a gene, from Native American, western European, and North African populations. But he was unaware that his family’s deep history […]

Hair comes in lots of different colors. There’s black, medium brown, auburn, light brown, strawberry blonde, and copper, to name just a few. But in the end, almost everyone will have hair that’s gray or white. I decided to visit my friend Cynthia Cooper, a biologist and researcher at Washington State University, for help answering this […]

The headlines paint a dire picture: By the 2030s, global warming could completely melt Arctic sea ice, imperiling the 19 known polar bear populations that range across the United States, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and Norway. Could, as some fear, the trend spell extinction for Ursus martimus?

Shelley McGuire, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences, has been selected to receive the 2018 “Excellence in Nutrition Education Award” from the American Society for Nutrition. She will receive the award, given for “outstanding contributions to teaching nutrition,” at the society’s flagship meeting in Boston this June. For more than two decades, McGuire […]

Columbia River Chinook salmon have lost as much as two-thirds of their genetic diversity, Washington State University researchers have found. The researchers reached this conclusion after extracting DNA from scores of bone samples — some harvested as many as 7,000 years ago — and comparing them to the DNA of Chinook currently swimming in the […]

As weird animals go, the mangrove killifish is in a class of its own. It flourishes in both freshwater and water with twice as much salt as the ocean. It can live up to two months on land, breathing through its skin, before returning to the water with a series of spectacular 180-degree flips.

Old assumptions about human breast milk are giving way to new thinking about microbes in milk and their role in children’s health and our immune systems. It happened again, most recently at a conference in Prague. After she gave her talk, a scientist came up to Shelley McGuire, a pioneer exploring the microbial communities found […]