CSC profs, students to give papers at science meeting

CSC Biology Professor Ron Weedon said he believes this is the most students to be involved and the most papers Chadron State has presented at the event in at least the last decade.

The papers will discuss research that the faculty and students are conducting.

Besides Weedon, the professors involved are Dr. Joe Corsini, Dr. Randy Lawson and Dr. Mike Leite.

The students participating are Emily Baily, Chadron; Julie Lancaster, Aurora; Sarah Lockwood, Chadron; Ethan Mann, Wayne; Eddie Moran, Panorama City, Calif.; Susie Morse, Sargent; Peris Mugo, Ethiopia; Ed Welsh, Winnebago; and Scott Wewel, Ainsworth.

Two of the papers stem from research on mosquitoes Lawson collected the last two years to determine if they are infected with a densonucleosis virus that might eradicate them. Lawson said the virus is already being used in Russia to control mosquitoes. He added that this study has tied in well with the West Nile Virus research that he and several students conducted last summer and will conduct again this summer. Thousands of mosquitoes from as far east as Valentine and North Platte have been collected in the West Nile project.

A related paper will look at research on mutant changes in the virus.

More of the papers relate to the medicinal value of desert willow that Weedon and several students collected during a visit to Big Bend National Park in Texas two years ago. Experiments in CSC laboratories have shown that the willow in powder form is able to kill staph bacteria, hazardous E-coli and parasitic yeast, something Apache Indians apparently learned many years ago.

While the research is not far enough along to produce a paper, Weedon said preliminary results indicate that the powder may also kill or at least contain cancer cells.

The trip to Texas also yielded some fossilized dinosaur eggshells the Welsh has been studying to determine the species that laid them. Weedon said in this case the dinosaur apparently was quite small.

Another of the CSC papers involves studying the layers of sediment found at the Hot Springs Mammoth Site to learn more about climatic changes thousands of years ago.

Also to be presented is a paper on species of plants recently discovered in the High Plains. Nearly 300 previously unidentified vascular plants have been found in Nebraska in the past 18 years. Weedon said such information is important in land use management.

The paper Corsini will give at the conference discusses how he has been able to use a freezer that produces temperatures some 80 degrees below zero to preserve cultured mammalian cells without placing them in an expensive serum.

Several of the papers the Chadron State faculty and students will present grew out of research that has been conducted after CSC a received a grant in 2001 to join a Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Center for Research Resources. The grants were awarded after it was determined that Nebraska was not receiving a fair share of federal monies for biomedical research.

Funding from the Chadron State Research Institute also helped support some of the research.