THE HUBApril/May 2005 Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research Volume 7, Issue 3

From the Hot Seat by David Stern

Mirrors Should Think Longer Before They Refl ect1

Last week I took a new Board member on a tour of the Institute and although he was impressed with the place and the people he met, I also was told that some disorder was noticed in the hallways, such as a banana peel sitting outside a lab, and a half-eaten pear. This reminded me how important appearances can be – maybe if I had been wearing a suit, the banana peel wouldn’t have been noticed.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder 2, and some BTI’ers might argue that senescent fruit in a corridor does not impede good science. On the other hand, I know one or two offi ces in BTI where, if I were

hungry enough, I could safely eat off the desk (don’t hold me to this!). Whether your personal domain is a poster child for Good Housekeeping or a candidate for a Superfund site, I think we need to agree that common areas (i.e. visible to passing Board members, your family, and distinguished lecturers) should not be in the latter category3. Please fi nish your fruit...or give it a decent burial.

Remember that the appearance of the Institute can have a major impact on recruitment. Would you be attracted to a job if you had to brush spider webs out of the way to get to your next appointment, or if rats were scurrying along the hallway? We spend a lot of time (and money) keeping BTI in shape, and mostly this job falls to Larry Russell and his crew, to the custodians, and to a few dedicated staff members who value neatness and the image it promotes. My thanks to them and all the rest of you with similar habits – don’t hesitate to pitch in!

We also think longer term: Since I have been here we have changed carpets, painted the inside of the building, and renovated many labs and offi ces. This summer, the auditorium will get a much-needed facelift, and sometime in the next year we will be taking another look at the second fl oor common areas. Please talk to Larry if you have any other ideas – we spend a lot of time in this building and need to keep it fresh.

1Jean Cocteau, French poet (1889 - 1963)2The Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford penned this line in her 1878 novel Molly Brown.3The opposite point of view holds that “A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.”

From the Hot Seat . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Faculty Search Results . . . . . . . . . . 1Oh, Baby! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1Prank Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . .2Outreach Updates . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 How To Get A Free Lunch . . . . . . .3Service Anniversaries. . . . . . . . . .3Talks & Travels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3Congratulations/Awards/Kudos . . .4 New Website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Management UpD8 . . . . . . . . . . . . 5Immigration Update . . . . . . . . . . . 5Fun Committee Survey . . . . . . . . .6

In This Issue

Congratulations to Moira and Danny Sheehan on the birth of their son, Maxwell Maurice, on March 30th. He weighed 8 lbs and was 19 3/4 inches long. Everyone is happy and healthy!!

Congratulations to Jianping Yang and his wife Yang Xiao, on the birth of their daughter, Eileen Xiao Yang on April 29th! Eileen weighed 6 lbs, 8oz. and was 19 inches long. Jianping reports that everyone is doing great!

OH, BABY!

As you know, Maria Harrison chaired a search committee which ultimately brought 5 candidates to BTI for interview. Of these, the committee recommended to me that an offer be extended to Hongwei Guo, and I did so. Late last week, Hongwei com-municated his decision to accept a faculty position at Beijing University, with BTI being his second choice. He cited family considerations in this decision.

Many of you participated actively in the search process, and I am grateful for the time that you took. We also had an opportunity to hear about some very exciting research from some promising young scientists. We will most likely be continuing the search with a modifi ed format, which is currently under discussion with the faculty. I will keep you informed as this process develops.

Result of Faculty Search

Volume 7, Issue 3 Page 2

We wanted to keep it simple: Steal the coffee and tea, put up a note, and instruct the Stockroom to send anyone asking for beverage supplies to come to our office. We assumed this would happen soon after the 8:30 start of the prank, and that we would simply end it when confronted.

But as time wore on our joke seemed to take on a life of its own. While many people connected the note to the fact that it was April Fool’s Day, no one went to the Stockroom to call our bluff. When the coffee pots emptied we took them, too, and the setup became more convincing. More-over no one suspected us, despite our office’s proximity to the scene of the disappearance, but instead flocked to Valleri’s office in droves to demand their caffeine fix.

Should we call it off at 10:00? Noon? “No,” someone told us. “Put it back on Monday morning.” It was a reckless idea, but the truth was, I think, that we wanted to get caught. Anonymously putting the beverage accoutrements back would have been no fun at all.

Besides, the fallout had become too entertaining. Loud Oh, no!’s and indelicate language emanated from the hallway. I’d assumed members of the Management team would instantly see through the ruse, as it was “THE MANAGEMENT” that had supposedly put up the note. But one of our leaders reportedly looked into the possibility of rigging up a Web cam to catch the coffee and creamer thieves who had prompted the management to take such a draconian step.

By late morning, an eerie silence had fallen over the usually well-trafficked coffee area. Still we waited for the ax to fall. Finally, at around 2:00, a certain junior PI decided that enough was enough, and went to the Stockroom to learn the truth. As I was out of the office at the time, my prankster partner had to bear the brunt of the second floor’s wrath when she was seen carrying boxes of Mister Koffee’s finest 100% Columbian out of our office.

What did we learn when we dared to tamper with BTI’s fount of hot caffeinated beverages? Our free coffee may be barely-potable sludge, but we feel strongly that drinking it is preferable to walking to the vet school and paying $1 for much better coffee. But despite the complaints, a strange fatalism kept even those who saw through the prank from going downstairs to ask for more supplies.

We also learned that taking away their coffee can elicit death threats, even from one’s supposed friends. And so I’d like to take this opportunity to declare publicly that I will NEVER do it again. I would suggest that no one else do, either.

- Anonymous

Prank Anthropology

The “BTI In-Reach Series” has been in full swing with a different workshop each month. In March, staff members learned about restriction enzymes. They set up reactions and ran them on a gel to view the products. Participants in the March workshop included: Kerry Curtiss, Kate Krupnik, Dustin Scheve, Liz Estabrook, Darlena Lord, Berta Gutierrez, and Judy Bishop. In April, we learned about plant-pathogen interactions by injecting two strains of bacteria into tobacco leaves. Ask the April workshop participants what they learned: Shawna Williams, Lucy Pola, Liz Estabrook, Kate Krupnik, Dustin Scheve, and Judy Bishop. The next workshop in the series will be held on May 11th.

In early April, I had another opportunity to teach teachers about advances in the plant sciences. Through the Cornell Institute of Biology Teachers (CIBT) I presented a lecture and activity on sequencing and microarrays to over 25 educators from around New York State. In mid April, the Outreach Program participated in the Liberty Partnership event, which brought about 100 7th-12th grade students to Cornell from around the area for an opportunity to see the cool stuff going on in the sciences. For these workshops, I led the “Plant Game” which introduced the students to the “choices” a plant has to make while trying to create it’s most valuable commodity; the flowers and ultimately, the seeds of the next generation.

The weekend of April 23rd was the annual Cornell-sponsored Expanding Your Horizons event, a program intended to introduce seventh and eighth grade girls to a variety of topics in math, science, and engineering. Wendy Vonhof led the BTI workshop to answer the question “Do Plants Breathe?” while Shawna Williams and I lent our hands to help out. The students used clear nail polish to observe stomata on the top and bottom of different types of plants and potted up seedlings to take home with them.

Finally, we are making our preparations for the next batch of summer interns. We had a tremendous response to our program this year, with twice as many applications for both undergraduates and high school students as last year. After the arduous process of evaluating all of those applications, the selection committee chose our interns for 2005. We are now we are just anxiously awaiting the undergraduate’s arrival on June 6th with high school students coming in July 5th.

Outreach Updatesby Nicole Markelz

On Tuesday, April 19th, 22 BTI volunteers turned out for the Institute’s first Earth Week Volunteer Day. Participants represented all walks of BTI life, from support staff to technicians to postdocs to the president. Half of the volunteers set out to the Lindsay-Parsons Biodiversity Preserve in West Danby to pull invasive garlic mustard and honeysuckle, while the other half went to work picking up trash on the banks of Fall Creek and Cascadilla Creek on campus. Under blue skies, with temperatures approaching 80 degrees, even scrambling up steep hillsides in pursuit of empty beer cans became fun. Much thanks to all who participated, including Holly Payne from Cayuga Lake Watershed and Betsy Darlington of Finger Lakes Land Trust for their invaluable help coordinating the events. Special thanks are due to John Dentes and Valleri Longcoy for their assistance with logistical matters.

Volume 7, Issue 3 Page 3

How To Get A Free Lunch

BTI Volunteers at Lindsay-Parsons Biodiversity Preserve

John Dentes deftly plucking invasive garlic mustardBrian Bell, John Dentes and the Mother Weed

By Shawna Williams

April Service AnniversariesGary Blissard 15 yrsKevin Ahern 5 yrsShinya Murakami 3 yrsYoshiki Nishimura 2 yrsArnaud Germain 1 yr

Apparently, Greg Martin is the only one talking or traveling! He recently presented the plenary talk at the Symposium on Comparative Immunology (Florida International University, Miami) held March 3-5, 2005. He spoke at a seminar at the University of Florida, Department of Plant Pathology, on February 2, 2005, presented a seminar at the Department of Biological Sciences and Carnegie Institute of Plant Biology, Stanford University, on March 18, 2005 AND a seminar at Fort Detrick, Maryland (location of US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID), and the USDA Foreign Disease Unit), April 12, 2005. Thanks for your submission, Greg!

Talks & Travels

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Many labs are to be congratulated on recent funding awards!

Tom Brutnell has been awarded a mammoth $3.8M/5 year collaborative grant from NSF Plant Genome to enhance genetic resources in maize using the Ac/Ds transposon system. Tom and colleagues at Iowa State University will continue to expand his first successful project creating a library of maize mutants for the plant community.

BTI will receive approximately $150,000 from the NSF Multi-User Equipment program, which we will partly match, for the purpose of acquiring a Gas Chromatograph - Mass Spectrometer for the measurement of plant metabolites. Georg Jander is PI of this successful proposal, which included research projects from more than ten scientists at BTI, Cornell and USDA. This instrument will dramatically expand our capabilities to measure certain types of compounds in plants or other organisms. Thank you, Georg, for spearheading this community effort!

Keeping busy in true Jander fashion, Georg has been awarded $300,000 from the USDA for one year for Microarray Analysis of Agriculturally Relevant Gene Expression in the Peach Potato Aphid, Mysus Persicae.

He has also received an $11K/3 year award from the NSF US-Germany collaborative program. This award supports expenses for Georg or members of his group who travel to the German collaborator’s laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (in Jena) to study glucosinolate metabolism and aphid defense.

A $310,000 collaborative effort between Georg and Nicole Markelz entitled “REU Site: Plant Genome Research” has been funded for 3 years.

Not to be overshadowed, Greg Martin has also been busy; recently recognized with two awards.

His project investigating the role of MAPKKKa -mediated cell death in plant disease resistance and susceptibility has been awarded $440,000 over three years by NSF Integrative Organismal Biology plus a supplement of $12,500.

In addition he has received a $360,000 USDA grant, studying the molecular characterization of two tomato protein kinases that promote disease susceptibility.

Rob Alba has received a recognition award for submission of an expression profiling manuscript.

Kudos to Paul Debbie and Pete Pascuzzi from Greg Martin for the creativity, extra hours, and persistence they put into setting up the TECAN automated liquid handler for bacterial enumeration. Paul and Pete also received recognition awards for their exceptional efforts. Well done!

Also kudos to Georg Jander for originally suggesting using the TECAN for this purpose. We were close to purchasing a “Spiral Plater” for bacterial enumeration but instead, utilizing the TECAN saved $16,000! The TECAN can process 384 samples per hour and the results are highly reproducible. If any other labs need to count large numbers of bacterial samples contact Paul Debbie about using the TECAN.

Kudos to Don Slocum from Greg Martin and the Martin lab for helping design a new floor plan for part of the lab and doing a great job knocking down walls and finishing off the renovation. Don scheduled his work to minimize the impact on our lab work, finished the job quickly, and the redesigned space makes the lab much more efficient. Thanks, Don!

Kudos to Donna Meyer, Liz Estabrook, and Mary Westlake for helping me avert (further) disaster by patiently reading, and re-reading, and re-reading proofs of the annual report. - Shawna Williams

Kudos to Valleri and Liz, two who worked “under-cover” on the BTI History and maintain the BTI ethics of work and kindness. - Len and Dick

Kudos to Rob Abramovitch, Sophia Ekengren, and Tracy Rosebrock for providing me with some bacterial plates at the last minute and to Greg Rairdan for letting me have some of his tobacco plants. The most recent “BTI In-Reach Workshop” would have been a bust without all of you! - Nicole Markelz

Kudos also to Wendy Vonhof for leading the Expanding Your Horizons workshop this past weekend and to Shawna Williams for sacrificing a Saturday to help us out! - Nicole Markelz

Kudos to Jeffrey “Sweetpea” Heichel for no reason other than he gripes monthly that he never gets kudos. ; )

Grants Awards KudosRewardsRecognition

CONGRATULATIONS!! ★

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Volume 7, Issue 3 Page 5

★★

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Management UpD8!!

Thanks to our website team, our intranet is much easier to navigate. Check out some of these pages!Bookmark them for future use!

Policies and Procedures: Forms, Forms, Forms: http://bti.cornell.edu/page.php?id=813 http://bti.cornell.edu/page.php?id=241

Hiring Toolkit: Job Descriptions: http://bti.cornell.edu/page.php?id=861 http://bti.cornell.edu/page.php?id=862

Employee Handbook:http://bti.cornell.edu/pdfs/hr/hrpolicies/Employee_Handbook.pdf

Great New Website!!

Don and Jude have completed the first round of preventative maintenance since taking over this responsibility from Cornell. A worthwhile effort and new coveralls as an added bonus!

A new greenhouse controls system is in the process of being installed. We expect this will be completed over the next couple of months.

The auditorium project is moving forward. We expect this project to begin in earnest around....(check with Larry) and end by.....

The audit committee met on April 21 to review BTI financial statements and pension plan statements. There were no significant findings (this is good).

Media Services pricing is being finalized and an inventory entered.

In addition to a quarterly Board newsletter, Shawna is developing a similar newsletter for “friends” of BTI, particularly those who have given donations. Our goal is to keep people interested and engaged with BTI throughout the year.

The Administrative Support Review has been completed and a transition is underway.

Discussions are underway regarding a BTI initiative to increase the number of female scientists at the institute. We will begin by focusing on the ongoing search, but will be taking a global approach to this issue, including a review of our employment practices, different lab models, other tools to support the development of female scientists.

Here are some updates regarding H1B petitions. If you have any questions, please let Lucy or Valleri know.

In December, 2004, the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act was signed into law. This law incorporated several provisions affecting the H1–B specialty worker category. Two provisions of the law are of significance to BTI and they have been summarized below.

New $500 anti-fraud fee. Effective for petitions filed on or after March 8, 2005, there will be a new $500 “fraud protection and detection fee”. This new fee will have to be paid by all employers (including institutions of higher education) who file an H1B petition for: a) initial petitions to grant an alien H1B status, and b) for petitions requesting an H1B nonimmigrant to change employers. The fee will not be required for extension of H1B status for those already at BTI. A petition is considered “filed” when it has been received by USCIS. We will begin submitting H1B petitions with the $500 fee immediately. This fee is in addition to the general filing fee of $185.

5% rule eliminated. The H1B “prevailing wage 5 % rule,” which considered employers paying no less than 95 percent of the prevailing wage as meeting the prevailing wage requirements, will be eliminated; employers will now have to pay at least 100% of the prevailing wage to comply with that wage requirement. This change is also effective on March 8, 2005. BTI has had very few problems with paying the prevailing wage, so this should have minimal impact on your hiring decisions.

Immigration Update

THE HUB

Boyce Thompson InstituteEditor, Valleri Longcoy

Email: VLL2@cornell.edu

Volume 7, Issue 3 Page 6

Fun Committee Feedback

I had quite a few responses to the Fun Committee survey sheet in last month’s issue of The Hub. Our food-related events ranked the highest (big surprise). These include the Chili Challenge, Pie Palooza, Ice Cream Social, potlucks and our newest event, The Wing Ding. The photo contest also had a good number of votes. So I guess we’ll continue with those and squeeze in other little events as we think of them.

There was one new idea submitted, which is a twist on an event we tried about two years ago. It is to have a children’s movie day in the auditorium on a weekend afternoon. Instead of refinancing your home to afford to take your family to the theater, we pick a new release or a classic (whatever we want!), serve up some popcorn and other goodies and it’s like our own private movie theater! If this is of interest to anyone, please let me know and we’ll get it on the agenda.

So I do need your input on two other activities. One is a summer family picnic and the other is three options for a bus trip. I had a number of people indicate they would be interested in a family picnic again. We have not done a full-blown family picnic for the past few years. That is, something off-premises (usually) on a weekend afternoon with lots of food, games and activities for adults and children. We have sort of been glomming on to the EOC’s “Welcome The Summer Interns” BBQ event and calling it our picnic but it wasn’t really a family event. So, what do you think? Are you interested in this?

Summer Family Picnic? ______YES ______ NO ______SATURDAY ______ WEEKDAY

______OFF-PREMISE ______ BEHIND BTI GREENHOUSES

For the bus trip, BTI normally picks up the tab for the “majority” of the cost of the bus, which can be between $1200-$2000. We usually charge staff a small fee of between $5-$20 depending on the trip and there will be a fee for the cost of tickets for whatever event we choose to attend. You don’t have to attend a specific event at the destination city. You are free to explore on your own as long as you GET BACK TO THE BUS ON TIME TO DEPART.

Bus Trip Options: _____ Summer Trip to Hershey Park, PA (tickets $22-$40) http://www.hersheypa.com/

_____ Fall Trip to a Buffalo Bills Football Game & Tailgate Party, Buffalo, NY (tickets ~$41) October 16th - Bills vs. NY Jets, kickoff at 4:15pm ______ December Trip to NYC for Radio City Music Hall Holiday Show and Shopping (tickets ~$50+) http://www.radiocity.com/rc_xs_index.html

Please fill out this survey and return it to Valleri by May 25th. You can also email your answers to me at VLL2. Thanks for your input!

by Valleri