News
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…
March 30, 2021
Ph.D. botanist inspired to start African American scientists series
Shawn Abrahams | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Last summer was emotional for many people throughout the country. Movements like Black Lives Matter led many to reflect of the role race plays in society, and to act. Scientists like Shawn Abrahams used that as inspiration to look more closely at what career options are available for botanists, paleobotanists, and plant scientists outside of research. Abrahams felt compelled to capitalize on that energy and inspire fellow minorities. “There’s a rich history of black people being involved in botany and plant taxonomy that…
March 26, 2021
#IAmScience Jordan Brungardt
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC When one hears of a magician, they think of a man that pulls a rabbit out of a top hat or ‘cuts’ people in half. Magicians have a lot of tricks up their sleeve. People do not think of scientists as magicians, yet they still perform wonderous things. “I heard a quote one time that says science and technology is kind of like magic,” Jordan Brungardt said. “For somebody that doesn’t know what is happening, experiments look like magic if they’re performed well. Think of cell phones allowing us to talk to…
March 19, 2021
#IAmScience Dangping Luo
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The greenhouse isn’t a place most researchers linger. With condensation sticking to the glass windows, scientists usually don’t dawdle longer than 30 minutes in the heat and humidity. But Dangping Luo, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to mind and takes his time tending to his rice plants. A research scientist in the Bing Yang lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, Luo, is a man of determination and conviction. For the past 18 years, Luo has been studying rice genetics and its interaction with disease. “When I think something is of…
March 12, 2021
#IAmScience Lauren Jenkins
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC As someone interested in getting a Ph.D., you apply to several schools and programs hoping to get in. When Lauren Jenkins first interviewed with Mizzou, she knew it was the one. But the interview was not the first time she’s had a good impression with the school. As an undergraduate student at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Jenkins’ first science conference was the Interdisciplinary Plant Group (IPG) Seminar at the Bond Life Sciences Center. “I actually had the opportunity to give a talk there,” Jenkins said. “I just remember being an undergrad…
March 10, 2021
Higher Viral Load May Lead to Less Severe Symptoms
Cynthia Tang and Henry Wan | photos by Becca Wolf and Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC You would think that the less sick you are, the less contagious you are. That’s just logic. However, science isn’t always logical. Especially with Covid-19. Henry Wan, principal investigator at Bond Life Sciences Center, recently found that when a person has mild symptoms of Covid-19 they have a higher amount of viral shedding. He also found that people with a higher amount of virus on their positive swab test are less likely to be hospitalized than those…