University of Missouri

June 24, 2021

#IAmScience Lyndon Coghill

Lyndon Coghill is the new Director of Informatics Research Core, and he is already making big moves at Mizzou. Lyndon Coghill, Director of Informatics Research Core, stands near his office on June 22 at Bond LSC. | photo by Davis Suppes, Bond LSC  By Davis Suppes | Bond LSC Lyndon Coghill’s official title may be Director of Informatics for the Informatics Research Core, but his job branches out much wider than just a single label. Even as an undergrad, Coghill wore many different hats.  “I was incredibly excited about the way that the MU Office of…

June 22, 2021

A feral past may help chart the future for Brassica vegetables

Although Brassica cretica doesn’t look much like cabbage, broccoli or kohlrabi, the wild relative is the closest relation to our modern vegetables and its endurance might show us how to make our vegetable crops more resilient in the future. | Illustration courtesy of Andi Kur By Roger Meissen | Bond LSC You might not envision plant scientists as the modern-day Indiana Jones of biology, but University of Missouri researchers have been hot on the hunt for an evolutionary history, looking for clues to the ancestors of our gardens and grocery shelves. To find the closest wild…

May 25, 2021

New observation from Stacey lab could help advance plant engineering

Large amounts of the Arabidopsis plant are grown at Bond Life Sciences Center for multiple labs to experiment with and use. | photo by Mariah Cox, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Think about how a home alarm system alerts a person to a potential burglary with sensors detecting whether an intruder picked a lock, came through a window or came through a garage. Plants are much like this, surviving with the help of their thousands of sensors that can send danger signals to the whole plant so it can react effectively. “Plants have to…

May 17, 2021

BIPS: A Semester in Review

Maria Lusardi showing how she connects the pH sensors to the Arduino. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC As the semester comes to an end, Bioinformatics in Plant Sciences (BIPS) close the school year with a lot of accomplishments: one team earned Best Abstract honors at the Mizzou Undergraduate Research Forum, three teams have papers in the review process, one team got their research published in a journal, and two BIPS members were even selected to share their work at the Research Day in Jefferson City, MO. These teams did not…

May 14, 2021

#IAmScience Kulbir Sandhu

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Kulbir Sandhu’s curiosity had guided him from place to place, but it was his fascination with plant science that has stayed the same. While Sandhu has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Bing Yang lab at Bond Life Sciences Center for the past six months, his path towards plant science began when he was 18 years old in his home country of India. In high school, Sandhu was drawn to the biology route because of helpful and enthusiastic science teachers. He grew to like it as time went on…

May 12, 2021

Beyond counting: computer science partnership helps speed up plant science experiments

Janlo Robil, graduate student in the Paula McSteen lab, came up with the GrasVIQ project after he finished a project that required him to count hundreds of plant leaf veins. | photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC It’s not surprising that researchers feel discouraged when pursuing projects that involve plant leaf vein density analysis. Manually counting individual leaf veins and measuring their density to understand how nutrients are transported in plants can take weeks of tedious work. That’s how Janlo Robil was feeling when he was working on a maize…

May 7, 2021

#IAmScience Sara Ricardez Hernandez

By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC As an undergraduate student, Sara Ricardez Hernandez did not have mentors that exposed her to the many opportunities available for underrepresented students — like summer programs and other research initiatives — but now a graduate student and a Life Sciences fellow, Ricardez Hernandez wants to make sure that no one else is ever in that boat. “I really like advocating for other people like myself. For example, the university that I went to for undergrad had very little mentoring for minority students, so I want to help people not only be able…

April 30, 2021

#IAmScience Ellie Swan

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Whether Ellie Swan is in the gym lifting 200 pounds or in the lab preparing samples, she loves learning how nutrition and exercise affect the body. “I’ve always really liked exercising and nutrition, and I like learning about that, so it’s interesting to me to learn about it on a very small level on how your body works so that you can have that better understanding,” Swan said. “I feel like once you have that base knowledge, you can take that on a greater scale for your body and…

April 28, 2021

Lab explores link between genetic differences and domestication in kale

Tatiana Arias and Chad Niederhuth studied the plant, kale, in this publication. | “Kale” by photofarmer is licensed under CC BY 2.0 By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC It is said that variety is the spice of life. When it comes to kale, much of that variation derives from domestication, and genetic differences that evolved over thousands of years resulted in different color of leaves, nutritional value, and habit and length of growth. Understanding the links between traits and genes could one day help plant scientists create better vegetables for…

April 23, 2021

#IAmScience Katie Horton

By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Katie Horton feels most at home in the shady woods of the Southeastern United States, so much so that she can name and give out a few facts about almost all of the plants. Horton, a graduate student in the Walter Gassmann lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, moved to Columbia in August, and has a lot to learn about plants native to the Midwest. “One of the things I’ve struggled with so far is that I don’t know many of the plants here in Columbia by sight. There are some…

April 21, 2021

Diller Costello Awarded Highly Competitive NIH Fellowship

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Alexandra Diller Costello, a biology graduate student in the D Cornelison lab in Bond Life Sciences Center, recently received a three-year NIH fellowship from the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute. It provides Diller Costello with funding to pursue her work on muscle and blood vessel regeneration for three years. The fellowship comes as a result of her proposal titled, “Signaling in the Microvasculature During Skeletal Muscle Regeneration.” Diller Costello’s research focuses on the coordination between muscles and blood vessels during muscle regeneration in adult mice. Diller Costello…

April 16, 2021

#IAmScience Chiemerie Azubuogu

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC When Chiemerie Azubuogu announced his new position in the Bond Life Sciences Center on his LinkedIn page, he thought back to when he first came to the U.S. from Nigeria eight years ago. “If I get into a time machine and go back to that particular date on the 23rd of August 2013 and meet myself there in the airport and tell myself, ‘Hey, in 2020, you have finished your bachelor’s, and you’ll be going to Ph.D. program,’ I’d probably doubt myself like, ‘Man, get out of here,’” Azubuogu said. Azubuogu…