News
Jan. 4, 2021
The Group Approach
Cell sheet development promises better treatment for destroyed tissue After 30 minutes on ice, a cell sheet begins to materialize in the fluid. | photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Imagine a sticker a few centimeters wide and as thin as a strand of human hair except made of cells. For medicine, this sticker — called a cell sheet — can regenerate tissue damaged by chemotherapy radiation wherever it’s placed. Kihoon Nam uses cell sheet technology to help head and neck cancer patients who have lost the ability to produce…
Dec. 22, 2020
Finding how a Virus Navigates the Nucleus of a Cell
Kinjal Majumder and David Pintel | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Four years of hard work certainly paid off for Kinjal Majumder. Majumder, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Pintel lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, spent the past four years looking at how the parvovirus, Minute Virus of Mice (MVM), is getting to the sites in the nucleus that it needs to replicate. Parvovirus is used as a model to study virus behavior because it is a simple, single stranded DNA virus. MVM infects mouse cells and transformed…
Dec. 18, 2020
#IAmScience Caley Smith
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC With her cheerful and friendly demeanor, graduate student Caley Smith can transform any rigid lab into a place of warmth and scientific excitement. In 2017, Smith was searching for a lab on campus where she could explore the world of genetics. “It was probably not until high school biology class where I got my first real lecture on genetics and genetic diseases,” Smith said. “It was more about understanding. You have this gene, and this mutation happens, and this disease happens. That I always found super fascinating.” By the…
Dec. 14, 2020
Visiting professor wins women in science award
Imbalance in research is steep, but visibility and confidence key factors for women Victoria Calzada is visiting the Donald Burke-Agüero lab from Uruguay to study aptamers. | photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Victoria Calzada was in the corner of the Donald Burke-Agüero lab, focused on her computer when she missed an important call. Eventually, she stood up from her bench and listened to the voicemail. She had won the 2020 L’Oréal-United Nations Educational Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Women in Science award for her country, Uruguay. “It was very…
Dec. 11, 2020
#IAmScience Zhentian Lei
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Columbia has been very different than Ardmore, Oklahoma, for Zhentian Lei. But the move from the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, a nonprofit agricultural research center, to Bond Life Sciences Center has been a good one for the researcher. “I like it here much better,” Lei said. “The town that we used to live in Oklahoma is very small and at least 100 miles from other universities. So, it wasn’t convenient to collaborate or visit other labs. It’s not like here where you can just walk across the campus to another building and…
Dec. 4, 2020
#IAmScience Toshi Ezashi
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Despite his quiet demeanor, Toshi Ezashi leaves an impression on those who meet him in the halls of Bond LSC through his quiet intensity and constant courtesy. The research professor was here before the “Joy of Discovery” sculpture in the atrium was built or the living plant wall was hung, calmly making progress with stem cells as part of the Mike Roberts lab team. “I’m mainly doing research on trophoblast that compose the main component of the placenta tissue,” said Ezashi, who first came to Mizzou in 1995. “Using stem…
Dec. 3, 2020
Connecting the World Through the Cloud
Maria Lusardi-Claire, an undergraduate student in the Mendoza lab, uses the cloud, a program apart of CyVerse. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Clouds come in many shapes and sizes. Some are big and fluffy, others dark and ominous. Or, as in David Mendoza’s case, the cloud is a hub of experiment information. Mendoza, an associate professor of plant sciences and scientist in Bond Life Sciences Center, recently joined the CyVerse, a cyberinfrastructure system used by Mendoza’s lab that acts as and allows his team and collaborators to see data in…
Nov. 20, 2020
#IAmScience Rachel Carroll
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Growing up with many pets and watching Animal Planet, Rachel Carroll, a master’s student in the Wes Warren lab at Bond Life Sciences Center, has known one thing about what she wanted to do for a living. “I just decided that I wanted to find a career where I could work with animals,” Carroll said. “As I got older, I realized that there are a lot of things affecting our planet that are causing some of these animals and ecosystems to disappear. These ecosystems are important, and their disappearance really refined my…
Nov. 17, 2020
Bad Boys of Biology Turned Good
Yosef Fichman, post doctorate fellow in the Mittler lab, walks through how the lab uses arabidopsis plants for certain experiments. | photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Shaking a bad rap can be hard. However, the Ron Mittler lab at Bond Life Sciences Center has shifted the scientific community’s thinking from seeing reactive oxygen species (ROS) as destructive to vital. “It’s always a challenge when you do something for the first time, and people don’t always believe you,” said Mittler, principal investigator. “They want you to prove it.” ROS are…
Nov. 9, 2020
Unknown Origins
$5 million grant awarded to study RNA’s place in start of life on Earth In his lab at Bond LSC, Donald Burke-Agüero examines his model of the RNA protein structure. | Photo by Lauren Hines, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The search for life on other planets may seem quite literally out of reach, but the search actually starts here, on Earth. “Something that guides people in thinking about how life might come about on other worlds is trying to understand how life might have started here on this planet,” said Donald Burke-Agüero,…
Nov. 6, 2020
#IAmScience Jessica Kinkade
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Growing up in Columbia, Jessica Kinkade never thought she would end up working in town. “I never expected to come back here, but it’s neat that it worked out that way,” Kinkade said. “It’s nice to be able to see my family and work in a familiar place that I’ve lived my whole life.” Kinkade went to college about 30 minutes east of MU at Westminster College in Fulton, MO. “I always had an interest in science, especially natural and biological sciences, ever since I was little,” Kinkade said. “I was always…
Nov. 5, 2020
Shining Light on Plant Reaction
Arabidopsis grows in Ron Mittler’s lab. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Daylight might not seem dangerous, but for plants, too much daylight can cause hazards similar to a nasty sunburn or a human scalding themselves. When you jerk your hand back from a boiling pan or a hot faucet, in a millisecond electrical signals are sent up your arm to tell your brain to move away. Like this reaction, plants have their own protective reactions to too much light. “I think what you need to understand is that plants…