University of Missouri

Aug. 25, 2023

#IAmScience Vikranth Chandrasekaran

By Sarah Kiefer With a forceful swing of his badminton racket, Vikranth Chandrasekaran propelled the shuttles across the court. A game with coworkers and friends is the perfect way to wrap up a day in the lab for the postdoctoral fellow. He’s offered to teach his colleagues the strategies of badminton at the University of Missouri Rec Center. “When I initially embarked on my journey in badminton as a beginner, I received invaluable assistance and guidance from numerous South Korean individuals who graciously taught me the proper techniques,” he said. “Now, I feel compelled to…

Aug. 17, 2023

Kranawetter receives USDA fellowship to explore plant border cells

Clayton Kranawetter, a postdoctoral fellow in the Lloyd Sumner lab at Bond LSC, recently received a USDA National Institutes of Food and Agriculture Postdoctoral Research fellowship in which he uses this mass spectrometry machine to study the significance of plant border cells. | photo by Sarah Kiefer, Bond LSC By Sarah Kiefer | Bond LSC Some of the most fascinating things in science happen at the border where one organism interacts with its environment. That’s the case with root border cells, and Clayton Kranawetter is one individual exploring this frontier. Kranawetter recently received a $223,000, two-year…

Aug. 9, 2023

#IAmScience Alexandra Diller

By Sarah Kiefer Alexandra Diller jumped off a cliff, in a sense. Instead of taking on more clear and straightforward science, she dove into vessel regeneration and never looked back as she works on the burning question, ‘can muscles regenerate in the absence of blood vessels and vice versa?’ “Knowing how vessels grow back can one day improve treatment options and help someone who has suffered a traumatic muscle injury and I really like contributing to that, but at the same time I want to know and do more right now” said the D Cornelison…

Aug. 4, 2023

Shrinking the Target: Developing Cancer Therapies

Michaela Beedy, Brian Thomas, and Margaret Beecher work on aptamers in the lab of Donald Burke. | Photo by Beni Adelstein, Bond LSC Shrinking the Target: Developing Cancer Therapies As cancer cells multiple and spread, doctors face finding treatments that destroy tumors while doing the least amount of damage. This search for precision in cancer therapies is for good reason. It takes only a few minutes in a chemotherapy clinic to see the detriment of cancer drugs on the rest of the body. “The issue with chemotherapeutic drugs is they have a lot of off-target effects,”…

July 21, 2023

#IAmScience Elaina Sculley

By Sarah Kiefer | Bond LSC For Elaina Sculley, the word filter means much more than narrowing down your search results on a website. The second-year animal sciences graduate student spends her days using computer programming tools as part of her bioinformatics studies and her work in Wes Warren’s lab at Bond LSC. Her focus is on the chicken immune response because they serve as invaluable models for studying immunology due to their widespread use in both commercial breeding and scientific research. Her main objective when studying host immune response is to gain a better understanding…

July 20, 2023

Modifying factor: Researchers identify modifier of key protein in rare neurological diseases

Bond Life Sciences principal investigator and associate research professor of veterinary pathology, Monique Lorson (left) and postdoctoral fellow Gangadhar Vadla (right) worked together to identify the ABT1 modifier in the diseases, spinal muscular atrophy with respiratory distress (SMARD1) and Charcot Marie Tooth 2S (CMT). | Photos by Sarah Kiefer, Bond LSC By Sarah Kiefer | Bond LSC It takes a keen detective to sleuth out why and how particular genetic mutations present the severe symptoms seen in neurological diseases. The labs of Chris and Monique Lorson are one step closer to…

July 10, 2023

#IAmScience Lahcen Amor

By Sarah Kiefer The ocean is a current throughout Lahcen Amor’s childhood memories. Growing up one block away from the Atlantic Ocean in Rabat-Salé- Morocco, Amor and his friends ventured into the water in search of a good time and some extra spending money. They would dive down to catch fish, seaweed and mussels, which they each dug out from the ocean floor. When they called it a day, they sold the mussels and seaweed to freezer trucks parked close by. The next stop was the movies or other fun activities to use their hard-earned…

June 30, 2023

#IAmScience Lorenzo Ceccon

By Sarah Kiefer Lorenzo Ceccon wanted a career full of methodical problems for him to try and solve. “I like science because it is a very logical thing. A + B = C,” he said. “It’s very systematic, so I guess I just like finding the answers to the questions I wonder about.” The senior biology major put his pursuit of logic to work when he joined the Dawn Cornelison lab as an undergraduate researcher at Bond LSC, but he found himself in that same reasoning mindset…

June 23, 2023

Cherng Scholar Rachel Weber

By Sarah Kiefer A strong, stable stem is like Rachel Weber’s career in plant biology. Weber started in a research lab only a few months after she stepped onto the University of Missouri campus for the first time. “I was really excited and surprised because I didn’t expect as a freshman to have this opportunity,” Weber said. Weber began by studying lignin with Jaime Barros-Rios, an assistant professor in the Division of Plant Science & Technology at MU. Now, she is continuing her lab experience as one of fourteen Cherng Summer Scholarship recipients for…

June 16, 2023

Cherng Scholar Lara Stefani

By Sarah Kiefer It was a dark and stormy night … While this line sets an eerie scene in many mystery novels, the setting isn’t often a lab bench. For Lara Stefani, suspense bleeds over between her hobbies and work. Stefani writes and reads science fiction to activate her artistic side, but as an undergraduate researcher in the Lloyd Sumner lab at Bond LSC she recently received a Cherng Summer Scholarship to be a detective of sorts on her own research project. “Mystery enables me to explore the human depths with different ways of…

June 2, 2023

#IAmScience Emily Giri

By Sarah Kiefer On the weekends, the “tornado machine” was the highlight, one of Emily Giri’s favorite parts about her dad being a meteorologist. “I was a very weird child,” Giri said. “In kindergarten, someone gifted me an encyclopedia about horses, and that was the best thing I had at the time.” Between a tornado simulation and an encyclopedia, Giri identifies these memories as foundational moments in her life that helped her down a path toward science. But, she still had to choose which specialty to devote her time and energy towards. Giri tussled with…

May 26, 2023

#IAmScience Saad Raza

By Sarah Kiefer It all started with the glow of a blacklight. In a simple experiment in high school biology, DNA from a jellyfish was put into the bacteria E. coli demonstrating the basics of genetic engineering. Saad Raza was hooked. Science became something that would fascinate and inspire him simultaneously. “I just thought that was the coolest thing in the world, and that was what got me into science,” Raza said. Raza, a member of the Bing Yang lab, sharpens his skills in the lab using various techniques to edit the genetic…