Welcome to The Department of Biological Sciences!

The department consists of a lot of people: faculty, administrative staff, technical staff, and graduate research/teaching assistants. One strong thing bonding us together is that we are working hard at things we really like, advanced biological education and research.

There is a lot to see on this website, so look around. You can get a very good overview of our research endeavors by visiting the web pages of the individual faculty members and their research labs. If you are a current or prospective undergraduate student, you will find detailed descriptions of our various majors, information about our courses and undergraduate research, and links to interdisciplinary opportunities. If you are looking around for opportunities at the graduate level, peruse the pages describing our doctoral programs in molecular cell biology, biochemistry, and integrative biology and neuroscience, or our highly focused master's program in molecular biology that is exclusively by distance.

If you have questions about any aspects of our department, feel free to e-mail any faculty member or post-doctoral scientist, or any member of our administrative or technical staff. Anyone will be glad to answer your questions or put you in touch with someone who can.

The complexity and diversity of higher organisms is based on the number of different gene products available for structural, enzymatic and regulatory functions. Hence, the finding that the human genome contains no more protein-coding genes than that of the worm C. elegans was unexpected, seeing that it encodes information to give rise to 200 different cell types and 100 trillion cells; most agree that this is in stark contrast to the finite complexity of the nematode worm with its 959 cells. What then, if not the number of genes, underlies the functional complexity of a higher organism?

Part of the answer lies in posttranscriptional processes, which increase gene product diversity by expanding the capacity of the transcriptome. Research in the Maas lab centers on RNA editing by Adenosine (A)-to-Inosine (I) modification; since inosine base-pairs with cytosine and is thus recognized as guanosine, this deamination results in a sequence change with potential consequences for downstream events. For instance, editing within the coding regions of a pre-mRNA can lead to the production of proteins with different amino acid sequences. Only few such recoding events have been uncovered so far, as their identification is nontrivial. However, such modifications have been shown to be vital for higher organisms, and thus analysis of the recoding capacity of A-to-I RNA editing is important for understanding how a limited number of genes can bring about complex anatomical, neurological and behavioral systems as we see in humans.

Christina Godfried Sie Ph.D. Candidate

Christina’s research focuses on the identification and characterization of new recoding targets, as well as understanding functional consequences of editing in select proteins. Access to genome and RNA sequence databases has allowed their systematic identification using biocomputational approaches, whereby A/G discrepancies between annotated gDNA and RNA sequences can be located and true editing events are validated thereafter in the laboratory. From a list of candidate genes predicted by a program developed by Dr. Maas and Dr. Lopresti (Computer Science & Engineering Department), Christina has validated and characterized several previously unknown recoding RNA editing targets using molecular analysis methods in the first part of her PhD thesis. Currently she aims to analyze functional consequences for some recoding events, applying genetics, protein biochemistry and cell culture methods. Part of her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Christina was the recipient of the Lehigh University and the Nemes Fellowship awards. Her research has been supported by additional scholarships; in particular, she has been a BDSI Research Fellow. Furthermore, Lehigh University has provided her with the opportunity to serve as teaching assistant for the Cellular and Molecular Biology, as well as Genetics introductory courses. She has also gained mentoring experience guiding undergraduate research in the Maas lab. Now she is looking forward to be part of the SEA program, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Initiative, as teaching assistant in the fall 2010.

Click here to read more about the Maas lab research.

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