News
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…
March 5, 2021
#IAmScience Shawn Thomas
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Social media botany advocate and self-proclaimed coffee snob, Shawn Thomas is the kind of person to find joy in everything. Thomas graduated from the University of Georgia in spring 2018 and worked as a bioinformatics technician for a year with Jim Leebens-Mack before joining Chris Pires’ lab at Bond Life Sciences Center as a Ph.D. student in fall 2019. Ever since, he’s been studying how genome duplications affect plant traits in a certain group of plants that include broccoli, cauliflower and kale. Genome duplications occur when DNA is…
March 2, 2021
Genetic link in primate points to source of adaption and longevity in capuchins
As part of an international collaboration, principal investigator Wes Warren helped study capuchins in Costa Rica. | Photo contributed by Amanda D Melin, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Through monkey poop and three years of work researchers from all over the world sequenced the Panamanian white-faced capuchin genome for the first time and devised novel methods to sequence many more wild capuchin genomes. These monkeys have large brains for their small size and can live past 50. Wes Warren — Bond Life Sciences Center principal investigator — helped sequence the genome to find…
Feb. 26, 2021
#IAmScience Maddie Graham
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC When the pandemic hit, Maddie Graham’s lab life shifted focus. The junior biomedical engineering pre-med student suddenly started to find answers by extracting RNA out of wastewater to help detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, which reiterated how important science is in our lives. “I don’t think medicine would be anything without research,” Graham said. “I think it’s really important to see the other side of things, understand how things have come to be and how they’ve made these medical advances. It was cool to be able to do something related…
Feb. 23, 2021
ACCase: The Gatekeeper of Plant Oil
Jay Thelen sitting amongst Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometers in the lab. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Two decades ago Jay Thelen speculated an unknown protein anchored acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACCase), an important enzyme complex, to the chloroplast membrane. He even published a paper about it, not knowing exactly what the membrane protein was. Flash forward and Thelen, a professor of biochemistry and principal investigator at Bond Life Sciences Center, now knows exactly what it is, which is detailed in a recent paper in Nature Communications. And this finding could potentially…
Feb. 19, 2021
#IAmScience Margaret Lange
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Building a community through screens and limited interaction can be difficult. However, it’s no problem for Margaret Lange at Bond Life Sciences Center. “I’ve met such wonderful people,” Lange said. “It really is true that if you surround yourself with the right kind of people who are positive, who think creatively and who ask good questions, it shows you how to model that behavior yourself. It teaches you to be better and helps you think better.” Lange was originally part of the Donald Burke lab until she became an assistant professor…
Feb. 16, 2021
From Sample to Source
Metabolite screening looks to better understand cancer Research scientist Rajarshi Ghosh in the Lloyd W. Sumner lab loads samples into the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (MNR) spectrometer for analysis. | Photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Doctors take blood or urine samples to see what’s going on in the body of a patient, and that’s not all that different from what metabolomics scientists do when looking at metabolites. “[The doctor] may profile 20 or 30 compounds to try to understand what’s going on with your physical health and well-being,” said Lloyd…
Feb. 12, 2021
#IAmScience Shuai Zeng
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC It’s not a straight line between basic research and Silicon Valley, but Shuai Zeng made the dots connect. Last summer, Zeng, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, had an internship at Google headquarters in Mountain View City, California, where he worked on an applied research team. There, he helped design and develop a state-of-the-art deep learning model about video recommendations for Google Ads and YouTube. Deep learning mimics the workings of the human brain in processing data through artificial intelligence (AI). It is used in detecting objects, recognizing speech, translating languages, and…
Feb. 9, 2021
Gassmann Named Permanent Director of Bond LSC
Yesterday, Tom Spencer, MU’s interim vice chancellor for research and economic development, officially named Bond LSC Interim Director Walter Gassman to the permanent director role. Below is Spencer’s announcement. Colleagues, Today, I am pleased to announce that Walter Gassmann, professor in the Division of Plant Sciences and a member of the Interdisciplinary Plant Group, has agreed to serve as director of the Bond Life Sciences Center (LSC) effective this month. Walter stepped into the role of interim director at Bond LSC July 1, 2017. Since then, his…
Feb. 5, 2021
#IAmScience Shrikesh Sachdev
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Science is a pyramid. Every breakthrough and discovery are reached through incremental steps that build off the previous level. Shrikesh Sachdev, a senior research associate in the Michael Roberts lab, thoroughly understands this. “It takes many small steps to get to a treatment or a cure,” Sachdev said. “It very often takes decades, but it’s nice to be able to put in your little piece of the puzzle that might help lead to the discovery, if not a cure.” Sachdev began his path to Bond Life Sciences Center when…
Feb. 2, 2021
BIPS: Bringing Plant Science and Engineering Together
Nick Dietz and Marianne Slaten observing a plant in the lab. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Technology advancements have always driven scientific discoveries in order to perform in depth research, but that has never been more true today. “A couple of decades ago it was perfectly fine to be an engineer and a biologist and live in your own world,” David Mendoza said. “But as science has advanced, we depend more on mathematics and computer sciences now.” Mendoza, principal investigator at Bond Life Sciences Center and associate professor of plant…
Jan. 29, 2021
#IAmScience Michael Pisias
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Michael Pisias came to realize that he wanted to study polyploidy while sitting in an undergraduate genetics lecture class at California State University-Sacramento (CSUS) a few years ago. This unique phenomenon is when the cells of an organism have more than two paired sets of chromosomes, which intrigued Pisias. “I knew I liked to figure out how living things work, especially at the smallest, genetic level,” Pisias said. “I find it fascinating that there are some creatures that are able to survive and thrive with doubled genetic information, which would be lethal…