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Debra A. Brock
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Debra A. Brock is an American evolutionary biologist and research scientist in the Queller Strassmann Research Group at Washington University in St. Louis. Brock received her BS from University of Southern Mississippi in 1976 and later obtained her Ph.D. from Rice University in May 2012. After completing her undergraduate degree, Brock worked as a research assistant at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, one of the highest ranking cancer centers in the United States. In 1991, she joined Richard Gomer's lab where she studied social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum and concentrated on genetic and biochemical factors that influenced group size. In 2005, Brock joined the Queller Strassmann Research Group. She began as a researcher and then stayed on as a graduate student. Part of her Ph.D. thesis, entitled Primitive Agriculture in a Social Amoeba, was published in Nature. Current Research Brock continues to research Dictyostelium discoideum, but her focus is now on its ability to farm bacteria. In her paper entitled Primitive Agriculture in a Social Amoeba, Brock presents how Dictyostelium discoideum has a primitive farming symbiosis that allows the amoeba to store bacteria into their spore bodies. When these spores arrive at a site lacking in edible bacteria, Dictydiscoidium discodeum can seed a new food crop. Brock would later publish another paper in Nature entitled Social Amoeba Farmers Carry Defensive Symbionts to Protect and Privatize Their Crops which details how the symbionts carried by farmers are not only food sources, but work to prevent the proliferation of non-farmer Dictyostelium discodeum clones that could reap the benefits of the farmers' crop. Awards * 2010 NSF DEB-1011513 Evolutionary costs and benefits of a newly discovered symbiosis between the social amoeba Dictyostelium, and bacteria. Dissertation Improvement Grant 06/01/10-11/30/11, $15,000 Works * DiSalvo, S., Brock, D.A., smith, j., Queller, D.C., Strassmann, J.E. 2014. In the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum, density, not farming status, determines predatory success on unpalatable Escherichia coli, BMC Microbiology * Brock, D.A., Read, S., Bozhchenko, A., Queller, D.C., Strassmann, J.E. 2013. Social amoeba farmers carry defensive symbionts to protect and privatize their crops Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms3385 * Stallforth, P., Brock, D. A., Cantley, A. M., Tian, X., Queller, D.C., Strassmann, J.E. and Clardy, J. 2013. A bacterial symbiont is converted from an inedible producer of beneficial molecules into food by a single mutation in the gacA gene. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. doi:10.1073/pnas.1308199110 * Douglas, T. E., Brock, D. A., Adu-Oppong, B., Queller, D. C., & Strassmann, J. E. 2013. Collection and cultivation of dictyostelids from the wild. Book chapter in Methods in Molecular Biology, Dictyostelium discoideum Protocols Humana Press, Totowa, New Jersey, USA * Brock, D.A., Douglas, T.E., Queller, D.C., Strassmann, J.E. Primitive agriculture in a social amoeba. (2011) Nature 469, 393-396 * Saxer, G., Brock, D.A., Strassmann, J.E., and Queller, D.C. (2010) Cheating does not explain selective differences at high and low relatedness in a social amoeba. BMC Evolutionary Biology 10:76 * Brock, D.A., van Egmond, W.N., Shamoo, Y., Hatton, R.D., and Gomer, R.H. (2006) Eukaryotic Cell 5, 1532-1538 * Brock, D.A. and Gomer, R.H. (2005) A secreted factor represses cell proliferation in Dictyostelium. Development 132, 4553-4562 * Brock, D.A., Ehrenman, K., Ammann, R., Tang, Y., and Gomer, R.H. (2003) Two components of a secreted cell-number counting factor bind to cells and have opposing effects on cAMP signal transduction in Dictyostelium. J. Biol. Chem. 278: 52262-52272 * Brock, D.A., Hatton, R.D., Giurgiutiu, D-V, Scott, B., Jang, W., Ammann, R., and Gomer, R.H (2003) Eukaryotic Cell 2, 788-797. * Brock, D.A., Hatton, R.D., Giurgiutiu, D-V, Scott, B., Ammann, R., and Gomer, R.H. (2002) The different components of a multisubunit cell number-counting factor have both unique and overlapping functions. Development 129, 3657-3668. * Brock, D.A. and Gomer, R.H. (1999) A cell-counting factor regulating structure size in Dictyostelium. Genes & Development 13:1960-1969. * Brock, D.A., Buczynski, F., Spann, T.P., Wood, S.A., Cardelli, J., and Gomer, R.H. (1996) A Dictyostelium mutant with defective aggregate size determination. Development 122:2569-2578. 
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