By Nancy Foasberg

Rose plays with dead Pacific Island land snails in lab.

“I want as many people as possible to know about this research that I’m so proud of and to read and understand it for themselves.”

-Terese Rose Osborne

Welcome to the Villanova Author Interview Series! In this series, Nancy Foasberg, MLS, Falvey’s  Scholarly Communication Librarian interviews authors who have benefited from Falvey’s Scholarship Open Access Reserve Fund (SOAR), which provides financial support to members of the Villanova community who plan to publish in high quality open access publications.

Dr. Teresa Rose Osborne

Department: Biology

Title: Postdoctoral Scholar

Article Title: “Flying snails: immigrant selection and the taxon cycle in Pacific Island land snails”

Research Interests: Evolutionary ecology of terrestrial invertebrates, particularly land snails, and abiotic challenges to Neotropical ant locomotion

Can you tell me more about what inspired your research?
This research started as a term project for my Biogeography course in graduate school, the study of which organisms live where, how they got there, and trends in organism traits over broad spatial scales.

I chose Pacific Island land snails as the focus of my term project. The general assumption among island land snail researchers is that snails travel between islands by being blown by wind or carried by birds and other flying animals. Before my research, I’m aware of only one paper that systematically evaluated the plausibility of wind- and bird-mediated inter-island travel using multiple Pacific archipelagos and multiple land snail groups—and that paper was published back in 1975!

For my term paper, I decided to follow up this previous study using a somewhat different approach. My findings agree with Joseph Vagvolgyi’s—land snail species that occupy multiple archipelagos have smaller shells on average, indicating that land snails that travel great distances between Pacific archipelagos are typically small, consistent with wind and bird transport of land snails.

Later, I decided to turn my term paper into a chapter of my dissertation and eventually a publication. I met with my then committee member (now co-author) Mark Lomolino to discuss how to present my idea in the most scientifically compelling light.

He suggested that I use the concept of the taxon cycle to strengthen my research questions. The taxon cycle hypothesizes that for any given island species and its descendent species (a.k.a. a single taxon), when the taxon is new to an archipelago, it can’t be very picky about the habitats it uses, because it isn’t yet adapted to that archipelago.

In many Pacific Islands, habitat quality increases with island elevation. The taxon cycle predicts that new species will be excluded from high-quality habitats by other locally adapted species, but as the taxon of interest spreads throughout its new archipelago and becomes more locally adapted, it becomes more specialized in its habitat use and can better compete in high-quality, high-elevation habitats.

The taxon cycle predicts that widespread species found on multiple archipelagos would occupy several different kinds of habitats, but only at low elevations; whereas species unique to a single archipelago or single island would each occupy a single kind of habitat and would be found at higher elevations.

My co-author Mark was a big fan of the taxon cycle hypothesis, but I was skeptical of its applicability to land snails; as far as I can tell, no island land snail researchers had ever taken the possibility of the taxon cycle in land snails seriously before.

I tested for associations between how many islands a land snail species occupies, how many different habitats it uses, and its habitat elevation so that I could show Mark that the taxon cycle wasn’t going to work for us. Instead, I found the opposite! The predictions of the taxon cycle were supported in our dataset!

While we have yet to definitively prove that the taxon cycle describes evolution in Pacific Island land snails, we have shown that the possibility can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Rose looking at a Pacific Island land snail of the family Partulidae in the Belau archipelago (Republic of Palau, Oceania).

For the non-biologist, what’s the most exciting thing about your research in this paper?
Well, for a non-biologist, I think that the idea of land snails flying across the ocean is pretty exciting! I like to imagine tiny shells blown high in the sky, in what we sometimes call “aerial plankton.” But for another land snail biologist, flying snails are probably the least surprising finding in this paper. I think the scientifically surprising findings are (1) there is evidence consistent with the taxon cycle in Pacific Island land snails, and (2) Pacific Island land snail species that are found only on a single island tend to have small shells. Let me tell you why these results might be surprising to an island land snail researcher.

To my knowledge, island land snail researchers never paid much attention to the taxon cycle hypothesis. I assumed that Pacific Island land snails wouldn’t conform to the taxon cycle, and I was surprised to find otherwise.

If land snails are flying between islands, we would expect that small-bodied land snail species would occupy the greatest number of islands and archipelagos. Indeed, land snails species native to multiple archipelagos are smaller than species native to multiple islands in a single archipelago. However, land snail species native to a single island are just as small as widespread species. Why? Shouldn’t they be bigger, since they travel between islands even less frequently than single-archipelago species do? I don’t know why single-island species are so small, but my best guess is that instead of flying between islands, single-archipelago species might be rafting on vegetation blown out to sea. By being large and living in vegetation, single-archipelago land snails can both avoid traveling away from their home archipelago and better travel within their archipelago. But this still doesn’t explain why single-island land snails tend to be small, instead of, say, a mix of sizes. This one is going to be a puzzle for me for a while.

Your article is openly available so that everyone can read it. For you, what’s the benefit of making your work open?
The scientific publishing industry is broken. Researchers make no profits off our publications, and often, we even must pay publishers before their journals will share our work. If we want to read another researcher’s work, we usually must pay for it directly or hope that our institution pays the journal for access. A handful of large, for-profit scientific publishers own many of the scientific journals and profit from the free labor of researchers while selling access to our collective intellectual labor back to us as a scientific community.

I prefer to publish in journals owned and run by scientific societies, which add value to the scientific community not just through their journals, but also through conferences they host, small grants they offer to students and other researchers, and more. If some organization is going to profit from my free labor, I’d rather it’s a scientific society than a for-profit publisher.

I published this research in Frontiers of Biogeography, an open-access journal run by the International Biogeography Society. Frontiers of Biogeography asked that my co-authors and I pay a small fee to help support the journal, and thanks to Falvey’s Scholarship Open Access Reserve (SOAR), Villanova is paying that fee for us.

Rose photographs Pacific Island land snails

And I’d also rather that other scientists can read the fruits of my labor for free, both because it’s fairer and because more people are likely to read it! Pay-to-read scientific publishing isn’t just unfair to scientists. It also makes it much more difficult for non-scientists to access our work. Anything that makes it harder for non-scientists to access and understand scientific information is dangerous for society.

Unfortunately, pay-to-read publishing isn’t the only problem here. Many scientists—myself included—have a habit of writing in ways that are difficult for anyone outside our subfields to understand, let alone the general public. That’s why I’m participating in Villanova’s research blog series. I want as many people as possible to know about this research that I’m so proud of and to read and understand it for themselves.

Now that this article is published, what’s the next direction your research will take?
I’m in a career transition at the moment, so I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. My postdoctoral position at Villanova University ends this summer, and I hope to start a faculty position soon. I’m very curious about how different kinds of environmental challenges impact land snails. In this study, I looked specifically at how travelling between archipelagos impacts shell size. In the future, I’d like to look more closely at whether land snails are rafting between nearby islands in the same archipelago. My previous work also examined how high temperatures, drying out, and the pull of gravity might affect land snail habitat use, shell size, and shell shape, respectively. My future research will continue these lines of inquiry.

For example, here at Villanova, I study how different kinds of environmental challenges affect the way ants run. I’m going to take that same perspective to land snails and see how well land snails of different sizes and shapes can crawl on flat, vertical, and inclined surfaces.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by slugs, and that’s the reason I became a biologist. Slugs are basically snails with small, disc-shaped shells covered with skin. There are even intermediate snail-slug animals called semi-slugs that have a visible external shell that’s too small for the snail to hide in. This makes slugs a great example of evolution in action, because we can see the “missing link” semi-slugs in the world today.

In my future research, I want to investigate what environmental conditions prompt snails to evolve into slugs. Researching slugs will bring my scientific curiosity full-circle and will make the Young Rose who lives in the back of my mind very happy!

Nancy Foasberg, MLS, is the Scholarly Communication at Falvey Library.

By Sarah Hughes

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is replacing the long-standing version of PubMed with a newly redesigned and more intuitive version of the database. The new PubMed is now live and can be found on Falvey’s Databases A to Z page or by using this direct link. Click the blue banner at the top of the page to begin using the new PubMed.

The old version is now referred to as legacy PubMed and is still available for use. However, legacy PubMed will be officially phased out and replaced with the new PubMed at some point in spring 2020.

Some of the more significant changes include:

• A modernized and cleaner looking search interface.
• Enhanced mobile device connectivity. Viewing PubMed on small screens like a mobile device or tablet is greatly improved.
• A more predictive search algorithm designed to be like searching in Google.
• An on-screen cite feature which creates instant citations in several popular style formats, including AMA and APA.

To help frequent PubMed users adjust to these changes and new functionalities, the Nursing and Life Sciences librarian created documentation on using the New PubMed. PubMed”Cheat Sheets” can be found on the Nursing Subject Guide in tutorials under PubMed Basics and Advanced. More in-depth information can be found on the official PubMed User Guide.

Librarians are here to support you as you transition to the new PubMed. Please contact your subject librarian with any questions on adjusting to the enhanced interface.

Sarah Hughes is Nursing & Life Sciences Librarian at Falvey Memorial Library.

Ritesh Karsalia receives the Falvey Scholar Award from Jeehyun “Jee” Davis, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Stewardship.

BY SHAWN PROCTOR

This is part 6 of a 6-part series featuring the 2019 Falvey Scholars. Read more about them every Tuesday and in the upcoming issue of Mosaic: the library’s bi-annual publication.

Scholarly Stats:

Ritesh Karsalia ’19 CLAS (Biology major; Latin American Studies, Spanish Language & Literature minors)

Hometown: Colonia, New Jersey

Faculty Mentor: Anil Bamezai, PhD, Professor, Director Graduate Program

Research: “Investigating the role of ordered (I_o) and disordered (I_d) phases within the plasma membrane of primary CD4⁺ helper T lymphocytes in their antigen-specific responses”

In his own words:

Ritesh’s Research:

My research process is founded on the scientific method, which has allowed me to conduct empirical experiments to test various immunological hypotheses. The subset of my laboratory group that I’ve focused on has been the spatiotemporal regulation of CD4+ helper T cells in response to foreign antigens.

While my principal investigator has been conducting research in this field for much of his professional career, not much information is known about the dynamic orchestration of cellular membrane-proximal signaling events and how they specifically affect the immune cell’s ability to respond. Therefore, I first began compiling the current scientific literature related to lipid-raft signaling and membrane-proximal CD4+ T cell signaling in order to locate the gaps in the current knowledge base.

My research project ultimately builds upon a series of previous studies that investigates how the order of cellular membranes, regulated by lipids, proteins, and cholesterol situated within regions called lipid-rafts, affects the ability of CD4+ T cells to respond appropriately. There are a few studies that have previously discovered that the order of CD4+ T cell membranes can be disrupted with a cholesterol-derivative, 7-ketocholesterol, leading to a decreased CD4+ response in the presence of a foreign antigen.

“CD4+ T cells are the major regulators of our immune system, and with so much disease history and technological developments in our modern world, I did not think that there were still so many question marks related to CD4+ T cell responses.” –Ritesh Karsalia, 2019 Falvey Scholar

Analyzing these studies allowed me to understand that increased membrane disorder leads to decreased CD4+ T cell response, if the disorder is induced relatively early (within 24 hours of antigen presentation). I then asked the broader questions of 1) whether this process is reversible and 2) how this process mechanistically occurs. Previous investigations had been unable to determine these aspects of this phenomenon, and the answers to these questions would allow scientists to better modulate CD4+ T cell responses though membrane order/disorder.

After asking these questions, I again went through the published scientific literature and looked at previous studies conducted by previous members in my laboratory to look for different biological mechanisms that could be affecting this process. I learned what mechanisms had already been unsuccessfully shown to affect this process and looked at some of the other promising events governing T-cell activation as areas of inquiry.

By reading previous literature that explained how 7-ketocholesterol specifically disrupts the order of lipid-rafts, I was able to hypothesize a potential way to reconstitute the disordered membrane and assess CD4+ T cell response, afterwards.

I started physically performing cell-culture experiments to test my hypotheses. I worked with DO11 BALB/c transgenic mice that were bred in the vivarium in the Mendel Science Center. Since I was primarily focused on analyzing the cellular responses of CD4+ T cells, I harvested the lymph nodes from these cells and appropriately treated these cells to test my hypotheses.

These treatment groups included solutions containing 7-ketocholesterol (to induce disorder) and cholesterol (to reconstitute order). Multiple concentration ranges were used for each treatment group to understand relevant dosage-effects. To gain a better understanding of the biological mechanism(s) affecting membrane-order-based responses, western blots were used to analyze ubiquitination patterns after the T-cells were appropriately treated with 7-ketocholesterol and/or cholesterol and stimulated with a monoclonal antibody.

The expression of CD69, an early activation marker of cell activation that is implicated with CD4+ T cell proliferation, was also analyzed using flow cytometry to understand if the processes governing the expression of this protein were affected by increased membrane disorder. For all the experiments I performed, MTT assays, which measure the metabolic activity of cells, were used to quantify how much proliferation and activation occurred in each treatment group.

Ritesh’s “Falvey Experience”:

The Falvey Memorial Library staff and the resources were crucial to the success of my research project. I am extremely grateful for the subscriptions that the Falvey Library provided to a diverse array of online scientific journals.

As my research project was founded upon related previous studies, and a lot of my work focused on filling in the gaps between these works, I was only able to access the hundreds of publications that I have read along the course of my project due to the library’s subscriptions.

These resources were also valuable when I was performing my experimental procedures. For example, I needed to isolate macrophages (which present the foreign antigens to the CD4+ cells) as part of my procedure when setting up my cell cultures to test for the effect of the different treatment groups. My laboratory did not have the kit that would allow me to isolate these macrophages from the lymph nodes of our mice, and the cost of the kit (over $1000) exceeded my budget. Thanks to the subscriptions that Falvey Library provided, I was able to find an alternate procedure which involved harvesting the macrophages from the bone marrow of the mice. This procedure was one which was unfamiliar to my laboratory group, but using the resources that the library provided, I was able to successfully implement the procedure into my experiment.

Additionally, I attended numerous presentations by Robin Bowles, then Falvey’s Nursing and Biology Librarian, when I was participating in the Villanova Undergraduate Research Fellowship for my research project. Robin helped me tremendously when it came to performing targeted searches for publications relevant to my project.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of information known about the spatiotemporal regulation of the cell membrane in the context of CD4+ T cell responses. Early in the summer, I visited Robin in the library – thanks to her help, I was able to gain access to a relatively recent international publication about CD69’s implication in tumor immunity. Through the interlibrary loan system and the help of Robin, I was able to access this publication. This was a very helpful document in persuading me to investigate CD69 expression as a part of my research project. Robin’s presentations also introduced me to Zotero and proper reference management. I have not had much exposure to writing scientific literature before this project, so the resources that the library provided to introduce me to documentation management, in-text citations, and creating an appropriate works cited section were invaluable.

The Impact on Him:

This project taught me the importance of using past research and inquiry as a guide to understanding the current state of our knowledge base and as a building block to expand upon. After completing my research project, I’ve really come to understand how the work that we, as critical thinkers and investigators, perform is really part of a larger academic collective.

When asking new questions and expanding upon the questions that our colleagues have previously asked, we’re ultimately creating a more comprehensive knowledge base for the future. It was extremely humbling to realize how the work that I performed is directly connected to the work that other international investigators have performed for tens of years.

This experience has influenced my academic goals because it has also taught me how much more information is still out there to be uncovered, and how crucial investigation is towards the advancement of science.

As an aspiring healthcare professional, I was shocked to learn that so many of the processes related to CD4+ T cell signaling are still unknown. CD4+ T cells are the major regulators of our immune system, and with so much disease history and technological developments in our modern world, I did not think that there were still so many question marks related to CD4+ T cell responses.

What’s Next:

This experience has made me more cognizant of the importance of scholarly inquiry and has persuaded me to continue performing research as I advance in medical school and become a physician. The work I will one day be able to perform as a physician will only be possible due to past research, so I hope to continue to contribute to the field and aid in its advancements through further scholarly investigations.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is communications and marketing program manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Elizabeth “Libby” O’Brien receives the Falvey Scholar Award from Associate University Librarian for Collections and Stewardship Jeehyun “Jee” Davis.

BY SHAWN PROCTOR

This is part 2 of a 6-part series featuring the 2019 Falvey Scholars. Read more about them every Tuesday and in the upcoming issue of Mosaic: the library’s bi-annual publication.

Scholarly Stats:

Elizabeth “Libby” O’Brien ’19 CLAS

Hometown: Portland, Maine

Faculty Mentor: Samantha Chapman, PhD, associate professor of Biology

Research: Foliar water uptake in ecotonal mangroves which are expanding with climate change

Other Honors: Fulbright U.S. Student Program award winner, will continue her thesis work analyzing mangrove ecology and environmental ethics in the Philippines.

In her own words:

Libby’s Research:

While working with Drs. Chapman and Matthew Hayes in a Florida saltmarsh on their research analyzing mangrove ecology in the face of climate change, I began to ponder about an idea that would become my thesis question: “What if mangroves supplement their water needs not from their roots, where they are competing with the marsh species, but through their leaves?”

At Villanova in the fall, the three of us sat down and revisited that question. In our preliminary literature review, we found evidence that a number of plant species use foliar water uptake across ecosystems, particularly where water availability can be limited such as high, mountainous elevations and dry, arid environments.

Mangroves are specialized plants that live in salty water. Due to the high salinity concentration of their soils, they are often under water stress as they need to extract, and filter water out of this salty environment to meet their physiological demands. In short, mangroves are living under pseudo-drought conditions. However, coastal mangroves sometimes encounter sea mist and fog, leading us to believe that they may utilize foliar water uptake in a similar way to other plants living under drought conditions.

Our second research question was “Do different mangrove species exhibit varying degrees of foliar water uptake?”

We aimed to answer this second question to provide evidence for existing geographic distributions of specific mangroves species and their projected future encroachment patterns.

To test our hypotheses, we built airtight chambers and placed the three different species of mangroves inside of them. We used humidifiers to mimic morning fog enriched with a tracer that could be detected by a machine in the lab after the experiment. Since we sealed off the soil from the rest of the plant, (meaning that the soil was not moistened by the fog), any tracer detected in the leaves of the mangroves would indicate foliar water uptake.

Using statistical analyses, we could identify trends in the data to answer both of our research questions. Once in the lab, we did detect the tracer in all of the species, pointing to some foliar water uptake, but we also discovered problems in our experimentation methods. This meant that while our results were promising, there were a few possibilities as to why they were what they were.

However, the three of us do not take this as a failure. If we had not done the experiment, we would not have known that mangroves exhibit some foliar water uptake; and even if it is impossible to parse out the differences in foliar water uptake across species at this time, we have a solid research process on which to build on moving forward.

Setbacks like this are not only common, they are inevitable. We are currently in the process of re-examining our methods to produce more reliable results. Moreover, I come away with a confidence in my ability as a woman in science moving on to answer the next questions.

Libby’s “Falvey Experience”:

In order to begin the development of my research questions, and throughout every subsequent step of my thesis, I needed to be a sponge for information. At first, it was overwhelming to experience a total information overload, but three things kept my project focused and achievable.

The access that Falvey’s online resources provided proved invaluable. The access that I was able to have to high profile academic journals and niche, often international journals, as well as published theses exposed me to the diverse and interdisciplinary research within the realm of mangrove ecology.

For the articles that were not immediately available to me, I used interlibrary loan. I was able to develop my experimental design from one article that I got through the interlibrary loan system, a resource that then-research librarian Robin Bowles (now the director of Libraries at Montgomery County Community College) pointed me towards—she was instrumental in my successful thesis completion.

Her knowledge and experience for sifting through endless articles and culling searches gave me papers that addressed my specific questions. I live-chatted with her in one instance which enabled me to get help from the library and keep working.

Finally, Falvey Memorial Library provided me with the space to work and collaborate with my mentors, a contribution that I cannot ignore. The 24-hour access to workspaces, printers, and online resources eliminated many of the obstacles a commuter student like myself might have faced in order to finish my thesis on a deadline.

Over this past year, at the back left square table of the library Holy Grounds, Dr. Chapman, Dr. Hayes, and myself drank endless cups of coffee and discussed how our mangrove foliar water uptake results fit into the larger conversation of coastal climate change.

The Impact on Her:

From Florida saltmarshes to Mendel Science Center, climate change challenges our status quo. As a soon to be graduate from a rigorous Augustinian institution, I am equipped with the skills to analyze, engage with, and speak about the processes behind the issues that affect our everyday lives.

My thesis, an investigation into foliar water uptake as a potential water acquisition strategy in mangrove species, offers a contribution to the scientific community in the context of coastal ecosystem ecology, as well as to Villanova University as an example of what a student committed to conducting research can achieve.

From the completion of my thesis, I have learned that the hardest part about research is narrowing the focus of your questions because analyzing the implications in the larger scheme of things comes later. I have learned that I respond well to a mentorship style that gives me the space to try and fail and re-try lab techniques, and that it is essential to take advantage to the resources available.

Falvey Memorial Library facilitated so much of my research success; from that, I have grown to have a passion for asking and answering research questions.

What’s Next:

After my Fulbright U.S. Student experience, I am planning to attend graduate school. I aim to continue this work but also integrate my research in philosophy in the coming years as I pursue a doctorate that blends ecological research with ethical considerations in a project that explores mangrove productivity and success through a lens of anthropogenic influence.

My mentors’ attention to both of these interests throughout this year motivated me to pursue a career that combines science and policy advocacy.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is communications and marketing program manager at Falvey Memorial Library.