COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 3 dies, except this sort of classic lastman survivor, the rest of the world seems relatively untouched, including, arguably, the suburbs of London.” Kramp is collaborating with Mizin, assistant professor of English in Postcolonial and British Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Doom, she says, also provides us with some insights into the collusion between patriarchy and the forces of colonialism. “It’s helped me think about how settler colonialism is enmeshed in certain forms of patriarchy, particularly in this text,” Mizin says. “The narrator presents the setting of New Zealand as a place that was full of riches, a kind of second setting that was being underutilized, and he is going to exploit it.” The work is relevant today as climate dangers become more intense, Kramp says. His and Mizin’s book will make the novella accessible to teachers and students for the first time and create a text relevant to a period with worldwide ecological, economic and public health crises. “We want to be part of a public discussion in terms of public health and climate change and global warming and modern urban living and the suburbs. We want those public dialogues, and I think we’ve really set the text up to facilitate that both in and out of the classroom,” Kramp says. For Kramp, the project also brings the reward of working with a former student. “It’s been really important to me to work with an alum of the program, and it’s been special to work with Sarita,” he says. “In the humanities, we are rarely trained to do collaborative work. This has been collaborative, but it’s also been a special kind of collaboration.” BIOLOGY LIGHT AND DARK For more than a century, scientists have been fascinated with cave animals. Evolutionary biologist Johanna Kowalko uses the cave-dwelling Mexican tetra to explore genetics and the genetic basis of natural variation shaped by evolution. Kowalko and her team use the Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, which exists as cavefish, and closely related surface fish in their studies. Cavefish have evolved a number of traits that are hallmarks of cave animals, including loss of eyes and pigmentation, as well as changes to behavior and physiology. Breeding cavefish and surface fish together, the research team can perform genetic mapping studies to identify genes responsible for the evolution of cave traits, which they can validate through genetic manipulation of the animals using CRISPR-Cas9, a gene editing tool that allows scientists to manipulate genes of interest to determine their function. “What you end up with are these fish that are the grandchildren of those parental populations, and they have tons of individual variation in morphology and behavior,” says Kowalko, assistant professor of biological sciences. “You’ll have some with big eyes and some with small eyes, some that are pigmented and some which are not. And so, we assess them for a number of phenotypes, and then we can sequence their DNA and use that information to do the mapping studies.” These studies allow the researchers to identify regions of the genome, and the genes within these regions, that may underlie the evolution of these traits. Kowalko and her team are studying a number of fish behaviors, including evolution of aggression and sleep, both of which are reduced in cavefish, compared to their surface fish counterparts. Quantifying these behaviors is critical for genetic studies. For example, to study sleep, she tracks activity with automated software, counting how often they have periods of inactivity that are one minute or longer. Researchers manipulate the genomes of the surface fish or the cavefish using CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out a gene that they believe might be important for sleep, then they quantify the sleep in those mutated animals. Kowalko recently looked at the gene that causes albinism in cavefish, oculocutaneous albinism 2, and discovered that the albino fish, which have two mutant copies of this gene, sleep less than surface fish that have two wild type copies of this gene. “I think the technology, in and of itself and what it allows us to do, is just really remarkable,” she says. “Cavefish just weren’t as tractable a system prior to the establishment of these genetic tools. Now, we can really dig into what are not just these genes, but what are the specific changes that we see in the nucleotide sequences in the different versions of these genes in cavefish, and how do they affect fish behavior, morphology or physiology? That was a question that was just unaddressable in this species previously, and now we can without going to another organism that’s millions of years diverged evolutionarily. The fact that we can do that, I think, is really just remarkable still to me.” BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, ADOBE STOCK The Mexican tetra, also known as the blind cave fish.
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