The Science of Size: Rebecca Heald Explores Size Control in Amphibians

Credit: Mark Hanson. Rebecca Heald Grew up in: Greenville, Pennsylvania Studied at: Hamilton College, Rice University, Harvard Medical School Job site: University of California, Berkeley Favorite hobby: Cycling A 50-pound frog isn’t some freak of nature or a creepy Halloween prank. It’s a thought experiment conceived by Rebecca Heald, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley , who is studying the factors that control size in animals. Heald’s “50-pound frog project” speaks to the power of evolution and to scientists’ ability to modify the physical characteristics of an organism by altering its genome. The project also incorporates many of Heald’s fascinating discoveries studying amphibian eggs and embryos. In amphibians, unlike in mammals, there are striking correlations among the size of the animals’ genomes (an organism’s complete set of genes) and several aspects of the animals’ size. For example, amphibians with large genomes tend to be bigger than those with smaller genomes. Larger genomes also correspond to larger cells and larger organelles (specialized cellular structures such as the nucleus). Heald has also demonstrated that these seemingly fixed parameters can be tweaked in the lab. International Woman of Science Way before dreaming up ways to design the frogs of people’s nightmares in her lab, Heald was fond of science. She remembers cutting her teeth on more mundane experiments in middle and high school, such as distilling ...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Being a Scientist Cell Biology Cellular Processes Profiles Source Type: blogs