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Williams College Biologist Robert Savage Awarded $214,990 NIH Grant - September 26, 2008
WILLIAMSTOWN - Robert M. Savage, associate professor of biology and chair of biochemistry and molecular biology at Williams College, has been awarded a three-year $214,990 grant from the National Institutes of Health for his work on "Segmental Pattern Formation in Annelids."
This grant will enable him to build on work funded by three prior grants from the NIH and the National Science Foundation, most recently a 2004-07 NIH grant of $342,489 for the same subject.
"The upshot of the grant is that it has allowed me to pursue a new area of research in bioinformatics," Savage said. Bioinformatics is an emerging field which utilizes mathematical, statistical, and computer methods to model and analyze biological systems.
Savage's research centers on annelids, the phylum comprising about 15,000 segmented worms including earthworms, ring worms, marine worms, and leeches. He aims to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanics of segmental pattern formation in annelids.
"They have any number of segments going from head to tail," he said. "And the question is: how does the head segment know its head and how does the tail segment know its tail?"
These segmental patterns are, in fact, determined by regulatory genes -- the same set of genes that code for segmentation during development in other animals, whether humans or flies.
The Savage lab's current project uses subtraction libraries (a method for isolating differentially activated genes) to compare the products of gene expression in a basic, or basal, annelid and a derived specialized form of the same animal from the same group.
This unbiased screen represents a fresh novel approach for the study of regulatory gene products in annelid development, which have traditionally been studied through cloning by homology, a strategy that possesses an inherent bias.
Savage, who joined the college in 1997, has taught classes in "Developmental Biology," "The Evolution of Animal Design," and "Evolutionary Psychology." He also directs a Williams summer research program at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Mass.
Savage is co-author of a book chapter titled Annelids, the Segmented Worms, in "Embryology: Constructing the Organism." His work has also been published in Developmental Biology; Development, Genes and Evolution; and Integrative and Comparative Biology.
He received his B.Sc. from Bowdoin College in 1987 and his Ph.D. from Wesleyan University in 1993, and has done postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School. |
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