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2006
 Professor
of Environmental Microbiology Jared
Leadbetter, Biology graduate student Elizabeth
Ottesen, and their colleagues announce a new
and efficient way of revealing guild-species relationships in complex
microbial communities. The approach allows them to discover
connections between bacterial cells from natural samples, and the activities
encoded by genes. Read
more... posted
11-30-2006
 A
new $4.4-million grant from the National Science Foundation will
allow a research team, lead by Michael
Dickinson, Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, to develop techniques
to turn brain cells on and off in animals as they go about their daily
activities, allowing the scientists to understand the details of how
brain activity lead to complex behaviors. The five-year program is
aimed at solving one of the remaining great challenges facing biologists---understanding
the mechanistic basis of complex behavior. The work will focus on fruit
flies, which are a powerful model system understood extremely well
at the genetic level. Read
the Caltech News Release. posted 10-6-2006
 Reporting
in the journal Lab on aChip, Professor Changhuei
Yang and his coauthors describe a novel device that combines chip
technology with microfluidics. Although similar in resolution and magnifying
power to a conventional top-quality optical microscope, the optofluidic
microscope chip is only the size of a quarter, and the entire device--imaging
screen and all--will be about the size of an iPod. The new optofluidic
microscope is one of the first major accomplishments to come out of Caltech's
Center for Optofluidic Integration. Caltech
News Release posted 9-5-2006
 New
results in this week's issue of Science from a team of biologists
and engineers led by Mory Gharib,
the Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Bioengineering,
show that the embryonic vertebrate heart tube is a dynamic suction pump.
In other words, blood flows by a dynamic suction action that arises from
wave motions in the tube. The findings could lead to new treatments of
certain heart diseases that arise from congenital defects. The lead author
of the paper is Gharib's graduate student  Arian
Forouhar. According to Gharib, the new results show once and for all
that "the embryonic heart doesn't work the way we were
taught." Scott Fraser,
the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology and Professor of Bioengineering,
adds that the study shows the promise of advanced biological imaging
techniques for the future of medicine. "The
reason this mechanism of pumping has not been noticed in the heart tube
is because of the limitations of imaging," he says. "But now
we have a device that is 100 times faster than the old microscopes, allowing
us to see things that previously would have been a blur. Now we can see
the motion of blood and the motions of vascular walls at very high resolutions." Caltech
News Release posted 5-4-2006
 The ASCIT Teaching Awards were recently announced, with professor Niles
Pierce among those honored for their exceptional teaching. Kudos!
 Chin-Lin
Guo has recently joined the Division as Assistant Professor
of Bioengineering and Applied Physics. His research interests focus on
modeling collective cellular and molecular behavior.
Building on years of research on the way that blood
flows through the heart valves, Mory
Gharib, Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering,
and his colleagues have devised a new index for cardiac health based
on a simple ultrasound test. The index provides a new diagnostic tool
for cardiologists in searching for the very early signs of certain heart
diseases. The researchers show how ultrasound imaging can be used to
create an extremely detailed picture of the jet of blood as it squirts
through the cardiac left ventricle. Previous work by the Caltech team
members has shown that there is an ideal length-to-diameter ratio for
jets of fluid passing through valves, which means that any variation
from this ratio is indicative of a heart that pumping in an abnormal
manner. Caltech News Release posted 4-10-2006
Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann
Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering, has been elected a Fellow
of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE)
in recognition of his many distinguished contributions to the field as
well as his involvement with critical issues affecting medical and biological
engineering.
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