News
Feb. 9, 2022
Old Drugs, New Application: Artificial Intelligence Aid Future Breast Cancer Treatment
Photo by Christina Victoria Craft on Unsplash By Karly Balslew | Bond LSC New drug treatments take time and money to develop, especially with diseases as complicated as cancer. Developing a new drug to help cancer patients can take up to fifteen years and can cost roughly $1.6 billion, according to a paper published in the journal Cancers. With this in mind, researchers at the University of Missouri aim to capitalize on drugs that already exist. Using advanced computing, they are turning to FDA-approved drugs to repurpose, or reposition, for future cancer treatments. “The motivation…
Feb. 2, 2022
Outlining Omicron: researchers determine key mutations in the latest COVID-19 variant
Bond LSC and UNMC scientists explain mutations unique to the Omicron variant Austin Spratt, undergraduate mathematics student in the Kamlendra Singh lab, shows protein models of the Omicron spike protein and the receptor it attaches to when infecting cells. “The genetic codes are used to identify the mutations, and then we use the structure to see how it would change over time. It’s going to give us more information about new mutations that occur,” Spratt said. | Photo by Cara Penquite, Bond LSC By Cara Penquite | Bond LSC It took eight days for…
Dec. 20, 2021
New method leads to discovery of placental cell type
Nathan Bivens, director of the Genomics Technology Core at Bond Life Sciences Center, loads the Chromium 10X Genomics machine as part of the single-cell RNA sequence method. | photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC During pregnancy, the fetus and mother can talk to each other without saying a word. On a deeper level, a special cell called the syncytiotrophoblast facilitates this conversation by changing the mother’s physiology based on what the fetus does or does not need. The Michael Roberts lab at Bond Life Sciences Center knew there had to…
Dec. 8, 2021
Bond LSC Researcher Wins Awards for 45-Year Career in Reproductive Biology
Even though Roberts couldn’t accept the award in person, the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine still held an award ceremony and presented the medal to one of Roberts’ past associates. | photo contributed by Michael Roberts, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Still in the lab after 45 years, chancellor’s professor emeritus Michael Roberts has received recognition for his career in reproductive biology research. Roberts won the Marshall Medal from the UK Society for Reproduction and Fertility (SRF) in August and the Gold Medal and Honorable Membership of the Animal…
Dec. 3, 2021
#IAmScience Harim Dos Santos
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Don’t mistake Harim Dos Santos’ kind demeanor and introspective silence for a lack of ambition. On the contrary, his head is full of reflection and big dreams. Coming from Brazil, Dos Santos has achieved quite a few of those dreams including researching at an American university. Dos Santos is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Olga Baker lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, developing ways to treat salivary gland damage in head and neck cancer patients and in Sjögren’s syndrome patients. “I’m loving it [here], really,” Dos Santos said. “It’s good…
Nov. 19, 2021
#IAmScience Qiongying Yang
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC In the mornings after her usual walk on the local trails, research technician Qiongying Yang heads to the Kamlendra Singh lab. Her desk is surrounded by large empty beakers and the windowsill houses two big, beautiful flowerpots she gave her desk mate. Her soft-spoken manner, warmth and mathematical talent aided her in helping multiple labs throughout Bond Life Sciences Center for the past 17 years. Yang came to the US from China in 1999. In 2003, she came to Mizzou and found herself as a research technician at Bond LSC a…
Nov. 10, 2021
Technique connects DNA instructions to biological architecture in space: Core collaboration maps the future
Nathan Bivens, director of the Genomics Technology Core at Bond Life Sciences Center, holds a special slide that assigns barcodes to expressed genes on different places on the tissue. This helps Bivens know where certain gene expressions came from on the tissue. | photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The brain is a unique challenge. It has billions of cells with billions of different functions, making it hard to understand what is going on underneath. MU cores now offer 10X Genomics Visium technology which allows researchers to lay genetic data…
Nov. 4, 2021
#IAmScience Clayton Rushford
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Clayton Rushford isn’t one to complain. While in the Marc Johnson lab at the Bond Life Sciences Center, he’s the guy cheering up lab mates when experiments fail or going with the flow when he must repeat an experiment for the fifth time. As long as he’s doing science, not much can bring him down. “It seems like a very generic answer but the fun thing about [science as a whole] is it’s more or less how we explain all the things that are going on around us with the use…
Oct. 22, 2021
#IAmScience Brian Thomas
By Madalynn Owens | Bond LSC Brian Thomas’ passion for science has been shaped by the excellent mentors he has had throughout his scientific and academic career. At Mizzou, that came from Donald Burke-Aguero. “His mentoring style really fit with what I needed going forward,” Thomas said. “In medicine you can help hundreds of people, but with science and research you can help millions of people as long as that science is translatable.” Thomas spent his first rotation as a medical student in the lab of the Bond Life Sciences Center scientist and professor of Molecular Microbiology…
Oct. 15, 2021
#IAmScience Li Su
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The work was tiring. The hours were long. However, Ph.D. candidate Li Su wasn’t affected by any of it. She was in her element During her undergraduate degree in China, Su studied turfgrass science. “There was a chance for undergraduates to do some research project, so I tried it and, although it was exhausting, I stayed in the lab and time just passed,” Su said. “I felt quiet and at peace. I kind of enjoyed it.” As part of the Dong Xu lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, Su…
Oct. 13, 2021
Turning Back the Clock
Megan Sheridan, a postdoctoral fellow working with the R. Michael Roberts lab, removes the base solution from a demonstrated sample of stem cells that will be grown into placental cells for study of their interaction with the Zika virus. | photo by Phillip Sitter, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC At 24 weeks pregnant, a baby can hear the mother’s lullabies. At 30 weeks, her belly is a little over a foot large. At 40, the hospital bag is already packed and ready to go. But imagine delivering only two weeks…
Oct. 1, 2021
#IAmScience Billy Schulze
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The best piece of advice Ph.D. candidate Billy Schulze ever received was from his father before a baseball game in high school. In past games, Schulze kept striking out. He wasn’t getting any runs. Things seemed bleak. Schulze’s father pulled him aside and said with a smile, “Don’t suck.” “That just kind of made me giggle,” Schulze said. “I think the real message behind that story is don’t think about it too hard. Relax. Have some fun…You can’t take things too seriously, having a sense of humor is so important. Working…