On April 8th, Dr. Suegene Noh, Colby College’s own Assistant Professor of Biology, contributed to our Presence of The Past lecture series with a presentation titled “How current genomes are shaped by evolutionary pasts.” This lecture was extremely fascinating and certainly stood out from our previous lectures. We have heard a lot about the impact of the humanities, psychology and literature has on our present day interpretation of the past. However, Dr. Noh was the first presenter to introduce explicit science into one of our talks. Her ideas were unique and her presentation was very well articulated. She understood and adapted to the fact that most people in the room did not have extensive knowledge surrounding the concepts of “multicellular aggregated amoebas” – this I really appreciated. Yet, her ideas fully fit into the Presence of The Past series mold. She began the lecture by discussing the context of her profession. Dr. Noh is an evolutionary biologist and primarily discusses the parallel between genetics and social interactions amongst multicellular organisms.
One of the driving concepts of Dr. Noh’s presentation was how competition between amoebas drives a genetic modification and consequently affects their evolution. This was an idea I have never heard before and I found it to be the most interesting topic brought up in the lecture. It was far from my realm of knowledge, but I could see how it fit directly into our Presence of The Past theme. Dr. Noh elaborated on this concept by dissecting the notion of social conflict. She stated how social conflict within the body effects how amoebas aggregate form to create one unit. I learned how the process of genes evolving within humans is actually a series of competitive interactions. Which means that in order to combat the predictability of formation, they compete against one another for different spots in the body. I found it interesting how such interactions can produce patterns within DNA sequences. The variation of a DNA strand can be an impactful way of interpreting previous evolutionary events. As well, Dr. Noh brought up the definition of “dicty” in efforts to further explain the social conflict of amoebas. Dictyostelium discoideum is a soil-living amoeba species which is used to test hypotheses regarding social amoebas. Research on dicty is essential to understanding the evolution of amoebas into multicellular organisms through social interaction. The applications surrounding Dr. Noh’s use of dicty in the lab was a consistent theme in the questions which she took from the audience members. A colleague of hers posed the question regarding how in her experiments, dicty in a test tube may respond differently to natural dicty outside of a lab. Dr. Noh responded and explained the adaptive, yet predictable nature of dicty. Such that dicty may have adapted to the conditions of her experiments and how she must understand she may not be getting an accurate read for something. Although this seems like a complication, she did not seem too concerned about this possibility. Overall, I was thoroughly impressed by Dr. Noh’s extensive knowledge and passion for spreading her lab work regarding the relative social conflicts of multicellular amoebas. As well, I will certainly have a greater appreciation for this topic going forward.