News
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…
April 14, 2021
Trying to understand amino acid regulation for the good of humanity
Abou Yobi working in the Ruthie Angelovici lab. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Many works aimed at improving seed nutritional quality have been faced with limited success because of the lack of clear understanding of how amino acids are regulated. Abou Yobi wanted to get to the bottom of this. Yobi, lab supervisor in the Ruthie Angelovici lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, has been working on understanding how amino acids are regulated in seeds for years. “We can use that understanding to improve seed quality in crop plants so…
April 9, 2021
#IAmScience Teka Khan
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Growing up in the countryside of Pakistan, Teka Khan did not have a science class in high school. In fact, his first science class was in college and it was in English — a language he did not know at the time. “First I had to understand the word meaning. So, what I did for physics, chemistry, and biology is I bought a dictionary,” Khan said. “I had to translate each and every word, and then I had to understand them, so I wrote down the meaning of each word. Sometimes I…
April 7, 2021
Defense or growth: a complicated balance
The figure shows the wild type of the plant to the left. The mutant type to the far right shows when the negative regulator SRFR1 and the TOPLESS gene TPR2 are absent in a plant, the immune system intensifies and the plant stops growing. | Photo contributed by Walter Gassmann, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The plant immune system isn’t active all the time. Plants must decide to either defend against disease or grow, but not simultaneously. The reason behind this process is not fully understood, and the Walter Gassmann lab at…
April 2, 2021
#IAmScience Nathan Bivens
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC With water up to his waist, Nathan Bivens is in his element fly fishing as he waits for a trout to grab onto the end of his line. Bivens picked up this hobby growing up in his hometown of Cassville, which is also where his path to the Bond Life Sciences Center began. The DNA Core Director is the kind of person who will always be there when others need him. “I really enjoy working with a variety of researchers across campus,” Bivens said. “My role and work in a core…