By Kimberly Ballard

Town Madison Groundbreaking Sets Table for Smorgasbord of Restaurants

By Kimberly Ballard / Photo by Steve Babin

MADISON -- Neither a yearlong pandemic, labor shortages, a long delay getting construction materials, a complete building redesign, nor the threat of rain, could stop the lollapalooza of restaurants announcing they are coming or expanding to Town Madison.

Five Guys, Super Chix, Outback Steakhouse, Slim Chickens, and a new restaurant concept known as Prohibition, all broke ground Tuesday on a central site at the corner of Stadium Way and Zierdt Road, just blocks from Toyota Field.

Madison Mayor Paul Finley, who just returned from a quarterly meeting with the mayors of the 10 largest cities in Alabama, said he always returns home more fully aware of how special Madison County is, and how bright the future is in North Alabama.

“It is not lost on me that we are not just having one groundbreaking at Town Madison, but we are having five groundbreakings in one day at Town Madison,” Finley said. “As economic development continues to happen in this area, there are a lot more announcements coming in the days ahead and I commend everybody who has been a part of it.

“With labor and construction costs where they are, you have a lot of different choices. Many investors would hold tight, but you haven’t; so, thank you to these five businesses and investors, for your investment in our city.”

Tyjuana Watson Lewis, managing partner for Outback Steakhouse in Huntsville and now at Town Madison, said as a resident of Madison, she is excited about all the developments going on.

“We will be bringing a new prototype of Outback called the ‘Joey’ to Town Madison,” she said. “It will be a sleek new building, much more streamlined, and this will be the first one of its type to open.”

Deepen Patel, partner and CFO of Power Brands Hospitality Group, gave an intriguing description of their new concept restaurant, Prohibition, which will be next door to their Five Guys and Super Chix concepts.

“We have been wanting to bring Five Guys and Super Chix to Madison for a while, and were happy to have found them a home in Town Madison, but we also wanted to bring something unique and special here,” said Patel. “We generated ideas from our current portfolio of restaurants and from restaurants we have visited.

“That is how we came up with Prohibition, a rooftop gastropub with a chef-driven menu and specialty cocktails, what I describe as approachable and affordable. We are very excited about that project.”

Patel said he and his family moved to Madison 20 years ago.

“It has been absolutely incredible to see the amount of growth and development that has been happening in such a short period of time here,” he said. “It takes a lot of planning and work, so, on behalf of the Power Brand team, we really want to say thank you for giving us a chance to continue in the growth of the Town Madison community.”

Alan Renfroe, cofounder of Legends Development representing Slim Chickens, acknowledged that due to residual fallout from the COVID pandemic, it has taken a few months to put the final deals together.

“On behalf of Slim Chickens, we want to say how proud we are to be a part of all the excitement and growth here at Town Madison,” he said. “We are excited to be a part of all the activity happening here and we are looking forward to growing this part of the Town Madison community.”

T.J. Lee, founder of Leeland Ventures, who was instrumental in bringing Slim Chickens to North Alabama, introduced their building partners, Hudson Company.

“They specialize in building fast casual type restaurants, and they will build-to-suit Slim Chickens to meet their specifications," he said. “Also, to Louis (Breland) - what a fantastic development. I don’t know of anybody who could have pulled it off but you guys. "And you have knocked it out of the park here in the shadow of the stadium.”

Breland said he is grateful for the confidence awarded him when his company started Town Madison with a vision of it becoming a destination for people from all over the state of Alabama, making it a tremendous asset to the city of Madison, to North Alabama and all of Alabama. “A lot of work goes on behind the scenes, and without the leadership of Mayor Finley and people like Madison County Commission (Chair) Dale Strong and District 2 (Commissioner) Steve Haraway, who has been here from the beginning, our team is working 18 hours a day through some crazy times, but as you can see, we are coming out the backside like we always hoped we would," Breland said.

“Stay tuned because the hits are going to keep on going, there will be more announcements, and more announcements, and more announcements coming shortly.”

Strong, standing alongside Haraway, reflected to just a couple of years ago when the development was nothing but bean fields, cornfields, cotton fields and wheat fields.

“I want to thank Mayor Finley and your city council, your planners, and the people of this community because this development will lead to the next tax dollars to create more police officers and more firefighters, new fire stations and police stations,” said Strong. “This is how you grow an economy.”

He pointed out that less than two miles down the road, the FBI is building a $1.3 billion campus on Redstone Arsenal, bringing more than 4,000 people to the area, along with the U.S. Space Command moving its headquarters to Redstone and the Mazda Toyota Manufacturing plant, which will be adding more than 4,000 jobs.

“Town Madison is perfectly positioned not only for today, but for the days ahead. I commend those that have seen the vision,” he said. u

HudsonAlpha Project Discovers Plant Chromosomes Older than Dinosaurs

By Lori J. Connors

It is remarkable that a plant that seems so simple from the outside is not only at least 300 million years old, it also has exceptionally large sex chromosomes, coupled with a complex sex determining system.

As part of a decade-long project, researchers from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology sequenced the complete genome of Ceratodon purpureus. Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.

More commonly known as fire moss, Ceratodon purpureus, has a lot to say about plant evolution.

Fire moss is found on every continent and can withstand rough conditions—growing in soil, rock, wood, old roofs, sand, and cracks of sidewalks. It was given the name “fire moss” because it is often the first organism to recolonize an area after fire destruction.

Like most mosses, fire moss has separate male and female plants, which is known as dioecy. Fire moss is also haploid; each plant has just one sex chromosome: U for females and V for males.

In humans, many normal chromosomes mix, so that the genes a child receives are a mix of genes from both their mother and father. This results in new combinations of genes; hence no two individuals are genetically alike.

However, the Y chromosome does not mix with the X chromosome. It is theorized that mixing does not occur because it is evolutionarily beneficial to keep the male genes together. Many believe the lack of mixing leads to gene loss in the Y chromosome.

Another characteristic of the mosses is that the lack of genetic mixing is a feature of both sexes, not just restricted to the male chromosome. Which bears the question, is it a lack of genetic mixing that causes sex chromosomes to lose genes, or is it something else?

To test this theory, the paper’s first author, HudsonAlpha postdoctoral fellow Dr. Sarah Carey and her graduate school mentor, University of Florida Associate Professor Dr. Stuart McDaniel, turned to C. purpureus for answers.

To study the fire moss sex chromosomes, the team first needed to generate a high-quality genomic sequence assembly for the moss genome. Scientists at HudsonAlpha’s Genome Sequencing Center, led by co-directors Dr. Jane Grimwoodand Jeremy Schmutz and funded as part of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, stepped in to contribute their genome sequencing and assembly expertise to the project.

Sequencing the complete fire moss genome took over a decade to complete, in part because of technology and complications with the sex chromosomes.

“The sex chromosomes are complicated by their many sequence repeats that are hard to assemble from short sequence reads,” said Schmutz. “As technology advanced over the past decade while we were sequencing this genome, we replaced parts of the genomes with newly resolved pieces. PacBio long read sequencing combined with a mapping technique called HiC eventually allowed us to resolve the complete sex chromosomes.”

Carey, who was then a graduate student in McDaniel’s lab at the University of Florida, was surprised when the genome data was received from the GSC team. The sex chromosomes in fire moss were huge. Each of the fire moss sex chromosomes is estimated to have 3,400 genes, over 30 times more than the human Y chromosome.

“The extremely large fire moss sex chromosomes do not undergo recombination, but they do not degenerate and lose genes like the human Y,” said Carey. “Our work suggests this so-called suppressed recombination is not as clearly linked to gene loss as many previously thought.”

The research team also discovered that the fire moss sex chromosomes are at least 300 million years old—older than mammalian sex chromosomes and even older than dinosaurs.

Control of reproduction in crop plants is potentially vital for food production, and the moss genes may provide tools to boost female or male linked function.

As a practical example, only female flowers make fruits in many crops, like melons, squash, strawberries, grapes, and many others. In breeding programs, breeders often use sterile male plants to control the parents of seeds and breed more of the desirable female offspring.

The moss sex chromosome may provide a new tool for studying genes that might have long term economic benefits, which could be key to accelerating breeding programs or increasing crop yield. u

Boys & Girls Clubs of North Alabama Receives $2M Pledge from Redstone Federal Credit Union

Boys & Girls Clubs of North Alabama has received a $2 million commitment from Redstone Federal Credit Union toward its Doors to the Future capital campaign.

The donation, which will be paid over the next five years, is the largest single gift ever awarded to the organization.

“This is a transformational gift from Redstone,” said Patrick Wynn, president and CPO of Boys & Girls Clubs. “The future is bright here in the Huntsville area. "We want to make sure that the Boys & Girls Clubs continue to keep pace with the needs of our youth and make sure their futures are equally as bright.”

Redstone’s leadership gift signals the launch of Doors to the Future, a comprehensive campaign designed to expand the capacity of Boys & Girls Clubs. The campaign, which totals over $7 million, will enable the organization to develop new Centers for Advancement, increase their transportation, build their scholarship fund, and expand into North Huntsville.

Boys & Girls Clubs serves about 5,000 youths annually, and Wynn expects the added facilities and resources to serve an additional 950 students.

“We see this investment as another way to improve the futures of youth and families who live in the areas that we serve,” said Joe Newberry, president and CEO of Redstone. “So many success stories have come out of the Boys & Girls Clubs and this gift will create opportunities for even more. "The organization continues to be a catalyst for positive change in the community, which is also one of our guiding principles.” u

Brennaman Named Alabama Retail Comp Marketing Representative

workers’ compensation fund for retailers and other small businesses, as a marketing representative.

Brennaman, a Huntsville native, will represent ARC in North Alabama and Birmingham. She joined ARC from Decatur City Schools, where she worked as a fourth-grade teacher and was a 2020-2021 finalist for the West Decatur Teacher of the Year. She graduated magna cum laude in 2016 from Auburn University, where she was a member of Mortar Board and several other honor societies. She continues to be a contributor to USA Today’s Auburn Wire.

Brennaman joins ARC Marketing and Agency Relations Director Boyd Edwards in promoting ARC’s workers’ compensation program through its network of independent insurance agents.

Alabama Retail Comp is the selfadministered, self-insured workers’ compensation fund sponsored by the Alabama Retail Association. The Alabama Retail Association represents retailers, the largest private employer in the state of Alabama, before the Alabama Legislature and the U.S. Congress. u

HudsonAlpha VP for Education Granted Excellence in Human Genetics Education Award

The American Society of Human Genetics has named Dr. Neil Lamb as the 2021 recipient of the Arno MotulskyBarton Childs Award for Excellence in Human Genetics Education. Lamb is a faculty investigator and vice president for educational outreach at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology.

Lamb oversees all educational programming developed at HudsonAlpha, including the creation of innovative teacher training, student experiences, public enrichment, classroom kits and digital resources that re-shape how science education is delivered.

The award, which includes a plaque with a $10,000 prize, recognizes individuals for contributions of exceptional quality and importance to human genetics education internationally.

“Neil’s creative and engaging approach to connecting with people at all levels allows him to make the most complex topics understandable,” said Dr. Richard M. Myers, president and Science Director and M. A. Loya Chair in Genomics at HudsonAlpha. “Neil built HudsonAlpha’s educational outreach program from the ground up, and it now reaches not only across the state of Alabama, but across the country and around the globe.”

In response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Lamb expanded his bi-weekly Shareable Science blog into a video series aimed at reducing misinformation about the virus and providing an easy to understand explanation of the science behind the disease, how it spreads and what scientists are doing to help diagnose and treat the disease. The video series garnered nearly 200,000 views from people all across the country.

“He is an extremely talented and dedicated genetics and genomics educator and serves as an inspiration to the next generation of educators and mentors in our field," said Dr. Gail Jarvik, president of ASHG. “I am personally pleased to recognize Dr. Lamb’s work with this award that is co-named for my own mentor.” u

Davis to Head Up Research Park Leasing, Sales for NAI Chase Commercial

NAI Chase Commercial has hired Rick Davis as executive director, Research Park- Leasing & Sales in the Huntsville office.

Davis, a former executive director of Cummings Research Park for the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce, will be responsible for all leasing activities for Corporate Park, Park Place, 4900 Bradford, 4811 Bradford Drive and other Chase properties within or adjacent to Cummings Research Park, the nation’s second-largest research park.

“We are thrilled to have Rick Davis join our office leasing team, focusing on our client base in Cummings Research Park," said Charles Grelier, president of NAI Chase Commercial. "Rick has an impeccable reputation with businesses and civic leaders and provides invaluable experience when it comes to economic development and site selection for business and industry."

Davis, a former longtime television sportscaster, served with the chamber from 2003-2011. After that, he joined the Birmingham Business Alliance as senior vice president for economic development, a position he held until January 2019.

Davis was chief operating officer of the Baron Critical Weather Institute and was also associated with Averbuch Realty.

NAI Chase Commercial is a member of the world’s premier managed network of commercial real estate firms, NAI Global. u

Mary ShirleyHowell joins HudsonAlpha as Director of Business Recruitment

Mary Shirley-Howell has joined the the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology as its director of business recruitment.

Shirley-Howell brings more than 10 years of area development experience to HudsonAlpha, serving in multiple leadership roles in the Auburn University Office of Research and Economic Development. Shirley-Howell earned her bachelor’s and MBA from Auburn University, and MA from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota.

“I have been fortunate to work with HudsonAlpha on collaborative projects in the past and now I am thrilled to join the HudsonAlpha Economic Development team,” said Shirley-Howell. “It’s an exciting time in the genomics world, and I look forward to attracting biosciences companies to Huntsville and HudsonAlpha.”

Shirley-Howell joins HudsonAlpha’s Economic Development team, which recruits start-up, early-stage and established bioscience companies to the HudsonAlpha biotech campus. In her role, Shirley-Howell will engage with local, regional and state economic developers, and national and international site selectors to grow the biosciences hub at HudsonAlpha and Huntsville.

“Mary’s experience in campus development and commitment to HudsonAlpha’s vision will keep HudsonAlpha growing and thriving,” said Carter Wells, HudsonAlpha vice president for Economic Development. “With a campus expansion underway, Mary joins at an opportune time for recruiting innovative bioscience companies.” u