Biology Students Earn National Research Awards

By Doug Goodnough

National championships are usually associated with athletic competition, but Siena Heights University recently had a national champion in the classroom.

Recent Siena Heights University graduates Lauren Coe and Jared Pirkle each won national biology awards for their presentations at the national Beta Beta Beta Biological Honors Society research conference in May in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Coe, a native of Perrysburg, Ohio, earned the first place Frank Brooks Award in ecology for her presentation on the effects of leaf color on the landing choice, egg-laying preference and larval growth of the cabbage white butterfly.

“I was hoping I would be able to place in nationals,” Coe said of the honor. “I was not feeling well. I was calm and relaxed and I guess that helped. We were really surprised I came in first. It was just a bonus.”

Coe is only the second Siena Heights student to earn a first place at the national biology conference. Billy Houghteling also received the honor in 1996.

“Why female butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on certain plants, but not others, has puzzled biologists for over a century,” said SHU Professor of Biology Dr. Jun Tsuji, who guided and supervised Coe’s research.

“The prevailing thought is that the females choose to lay eggs on plants that are the most suitable for the growth of their offspring. Lauren’s research results, however, suggest that female butterfly behavior may not always be for the benefit of her offspring.”

Coe said she tested the butterflies on three different colors of plants: green, yellow and variegated. “I found that the females preferred to lay their eggs on the green plants,” Coe said of her findings.

However, when it came to the larvae, there was no discernible difference in their weight, suggesting plant color did not affect growth and development patterns.

“The larvae just like to eat. They were all equal weight,” Coe said.

Coe credits Dr. Tsuji, who guided through more than two years of research on her project.

“He was a great guidance to me and gave me a lot of tips and suggestions,” Coe said. “And the editing is still going. We’re still trying to get (the research) published. Jun’s even continuing experiments.”

Pirkle, a native of Deerfield, Mich., earned the third place John Johnson Award in organismal biology for his poster presentation on the circadian activity of the house mouse.

“I’ve always been really fascinated with sleep studies, and this was a roundabout way to approach this topic,” Pirkle said. “They’ve used the house mouse before in other research. They were easy enough to use and I had the resources where I could pull a sleep study together.”

Pirkle was able to kind of quantify the ruggedness of the pacemaker, or the biological clock that orchestrates light and dark cycles. He was then able to graph that out and compare to human behavior. “We’re very similar to mice in a lot of ways,” Pirkle said.

Pirkle’s research was guided and supervised by SHU Professor of Biology Dr. Carl Kaster.

“Most organisms, including humans, have an internal circadian clock that anticipates daily environmental changes, such as day and night,” Kaster said. “Mice use their internal clocks to regulate their behavior, so that they rest during the day and are active in the evening. Jared experimentally manipulated the length of the dark phase in a 24-hour cycle of light and darkness and discovered that these conditions significantly affected the wheel-running activity of
the mice.”

“Carl has truly been fantastic,” Pirkle said. “He gives back what you put into it, and that’s what I appreciate the most. I made sure that my effort would always match his. That’s all I can really expect from a professor.”

Coe and Pirkle, who each received a bachelor’s degree in biology in May, were one of more than 300 students from 52 colleges and universities who presented at the conference. An 11-member delegation from SHU’s Xi Omega chapter of Beta Beta Beta attended the national conference.

This fall, Coe is starting medical school at the Kent State College of Podiatric Medicine, while Pirkle is entering the Doctor of Physical Therapy program at Andrews University.