UNC Asheville faculty, staff and students are taking their scientific explorations to a new level with major grant funding from National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the UNC System. These grants are helping to fund projects to save an endangered snake species, help chemistry students thrive while completing a challenging major, and understand the neurobiology of salamanders.

When UNC Asheville Assistant Professor of Biology Graham Reynolds discovered a new species of snake in the Bahamas in 2015, he discovered something else, too—the Silver Boa, as it came to be named, was endangered. In fact, it’s the most endangered species of boa in the world.

Now Reynolds has a chance to help save the species he discovered with a grant from National Geographic Society, making Reynolds a National Geographic Explorer through 2022. The grant for $32,822 will fund at least four expeditions to the Bahamas, where Reynolds and his team will begin the process of preventing the Silver Boa’s extinction.

“On the island we will be surveying for boas, and for each boa we will record as much data as possible, mark them with a microchip, and obtain a DNA sample,” Reynolds explained. “The North Carolina Zoo will bring a veterinary team to do health assessments on all the snakes. We will also be conducting comprehensive habitat surveys to determine which areas of the island can be ecologically restored from previous human and hurricane damage.”

Reynolds and his team will also be setting up camera stations and tracking stations to survey for invasive mammals such as rats and mice, which can impact the regeneration of the forest, and installing signs to keep people away from the sensitive habitat.

It’s exciting news for Reynolds—and for the Silver Boa, of course, which numbers only around 135—but it’s a huge opportunity for students, as well. Reynolds plans to take at least one UNC Asheville student with him on his 2020 expedition to the Bahamas, and gifts to support this travel can be made at unca.edu/researchabroad.

“We are planning on obtaining DNA samples from the boas and not just bringing them back to the lab, but actually using a brand-new prototype device to sequence the DNA in real time in the field!” Reynolds said. “This will be the first time this has been tried on these Caribbean islands. The student will be in charge of learning to operate the DNA sequencer and running the experiments in the field from our expedition campsites using solar powered electronics.”

UNC Asheville’s Chemistry Department has garnered more than one million dollars in grant support this year for two different projects: $997,988 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its successful undergraduate model of chemistry education and student support, and $326,674 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for undergraduate research on the ATP synthase.

The NSF grant will be used to create a multi-faceted program between the Department of Chemistry and Student Affairs, deeply focused on supporting students. The project will provide need- and merit-based scholarships, and will focus not only on the academic challenges to being a successful chemistry student, but the social and emotional challenges as well. It’s this holistic student support structure that will truly help to enhance the learning environment for chemistry majors.

“The collaboration with the Office of Student Affairs is something pretty new for NSF projects, but something central to the liberal arts and sciences at UNC Asheville,” said Sally Wasileski, chair and professor of chemistry. “As a result, this innovative model aims to have an impact not just on our campus, but could impact STEM education at other schools and in other departments. We’ll have a significant research component on the program itself, in addition to our coursework, lab work and student support.”

“This innovative model aims to have an impact not just on our campus, but could impact STEM education at other schools and in other departments,” said Sally Wasileski.

The NSF grant continues the successful Chemistry Scholars Program that was established at UNC Asheville in 2011; since then, 116 students including 39 scholarship recipients have graduated from the program.

Direct funding to the Chemistry Department also comes from a $326,674 grant from the NIH to support undergraduate research on ATP synthase, the biological rotary motor that completes the metabolic conversion of food to usable chemical energy in all cells.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Ryan Steed will direct this research for the next three years. Some of the grant funds will be used to purchase a biocompatible liquid chromatography system for protein purification and an electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer for experiments studying the movement of the motor. Funds will support the work of five student researchers by providing materials, stipends for summer research, and travel funds for professional conferences. 

Will a salamander that has just laid eggs crawl off, or will she remain to protect her offspring? And if she does stay, what evolutionary shift made her do that? The answer is somewhere within the salamander’s molecular and neural mechanisms, and Biology Associate Professor Rebecca Hale, along with project partners Sabrina Burmeister at UNC-Chapel Hill and Chris Balakrishnan at Eastern Carolina University, received a $74,996 grant from the UNC System to work together over the course of the academic year to better understand the amphibian brain.

“I’m really interested in the evolution of parental behavior. Why do animals shift from laying their eggs and leaving them to hanging around with them, presumably to increase their survival and success, but at the cost of the parent doing other things?” Hale explained. “Parental care is not without costs. It’s risky in terms of they often draw attention to themselves, they’re not feeding as much as they normally would, they’re not seeking out additional mates.”

The project started with Hale and two of her students, Kimberly Treadaway and Jacob Boone, and UNC-Chapel Hill doctoral student Cody Sorrell, who traveled to Arkansas to conduct the field work of finding and collecting marbled salamanders—a species which does remain with its eggs—and ringed salamanders—a species which leaves its eggs behind.

In the spring semester, Burmeister will take the lead at UNC-Chapel Hill in the process of dissecting the salamander brains; UNC Asheville students will join in to learn the method for extracting the specific parts of the brain that they suspect are related to parental care. The project then moves to ECU, where UNC Asheville students will join Balakrishnan and his graduate students to learn how to work through the bioinformatics that they’ve gathered.

That may seem like a lot of work just to understand some salamander behavior. But their discoveries may have wider implications. “It can give us some insight into broad patterns. How similar are patterns of behavior across species? We think of mammals of being so incredibly complex, and humans as part of that, but what the discipline is finding so far is that there are similarities at the really fundamental physiological levels, there’s similarities across all groups of vertebrates,” Hale said. “It also allows us to understand social behavior in general, and the role of neurobiology in social behavior.”

Though this project will all take place within the year funded by the grant, Hale hopes this will serve as a pilot project to bring in additional grant funding, supporting more exploration and discovery for science students at UNC Asheville.