News
April 29, 2020
The Lab in Time of COVID-19
The main halls of Bond LSC are empty due to researchers being told to work from home. | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC On an average day, you can find post doctorate Norman Best surrounded by corn in the greenhouse or at his bench in the McSteen lab doing molecular work. However, since Columbia and state leaders issued a stay-at-home order on March 25 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, this means Bond LSC is mostly empty and researchers like Best are at home writing. “It’s definitely…
April 29, 2020
Influenza & COVID-19 Research: A Campus-wide Effort
Henry Wan | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC With shelter in place orders being extended throughout the country and events being canceled, COVID-19 is a pressing issue, and influenza researchers at MU have been pivoting recently to begin studying the virus. Henry Wan, an influenza researcher and Bond LSC principal investigator, is planning on expanding his work to start looking at COVID-19 along with a team of epidemiologists, anthropologists, engineers, and more at MU. While influenza and COVID-19 are not the same virus, both are infectious respiratory…
April 27, 2020
Making sense of junk
Mary Butler, an undergraduate from Truman State University, gains experience working on experiments in the lab of Bond LSC’s Cheryl Rosenfeld. | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC By Mariah Cox How did an undergraduate student from Truman State University spend last summer working on a research project with a Bond Life Sciences Center primary investigator and become on track to be published as first author several months thereafter? A nationwide National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored program has allowed Mary Butler to jump-start her research career early on. Butler, a sophomore biochemistry…
April 24, 2020
#IAmScience Jessica Milano-Foster
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC The placenta is a crucial organ that develops in a woman’s body during pregnancy that provides oxygen and nutrients to the fetus. After her experience doing research on this organ while getting her master’s degree at the University of Kansas Medical Center, current MU Ph.D. student Jessica Milano-Foster has become passionate about studying it. To continue her education, she has teamed up with Laura Schulz’s lab in the MU School of Medicine and Michael Roberts’ lab at Bond LSC to look at the role of…
April 22, 2020
Boron: Exposed
Figure B is a colorized radiographic image that shows the path of boron in a five-day-old maize seedling. | photo contributed by Alexandra Housh, Michaela Matthes, Amber Gerheart, Stacy Wilder, Kun-Eek Kil, Michael Schueller, James Guthrie, Paula McSteen, and Richard Ferrieri. By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC The element Boron, while extremely low in levels, leaves a trail of green and blue radioactive decay as it travels through the veins of plants. Due to radiotracer technology, this picture of the element’s movement provides this unique insight to what’s going on inside the leaves, stems and roots of…
April 20, 2020
New Genome Sequencing Instrument Pays Dividends at DNA Core
Nathan Bivens and Wes Warren. | Photos by Mariah Cox & Erica Overfelt, Bond LSC By Jerry Duggan | Bond LSC Behind any breakthrough in science lies a research process full of precise methods and instrumentation essential to moving from hypothesis to discovery. Some of those genetic breakthroughs just became more possible on UM System campuses, thanks to a new, more efficient genome sequencing instrument at MU’s DNA Core. The NovaSeq instrument was first put to use in December, purchased with funds from an UM System tier 1 grant meant to benefit…
April 17, 2020
#IAmScience Bing Stacey
By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC Bing Stacey works on her soybean genetics papers in her office with the company of a plant on the windowsill and a large tropical photo of the Philippines on the second floor of Bond LSC. For the past few years, Bing Stacey has been working towards uncovering the secrets of soybean genes. That work aims to identify what different genes do within the soybean genome so that they can be manipulated and create higher crop yields. Soybeans are a major source of cooking oil and protein…
April 16, 2020
Dong Xu receives national honor
Dong Xu, Bond LSC principal investigator and Shumaker Endowed Professor in the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering. | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC A Bond Life Sciences Center researcher has been inducted into an elite organization comprised of two percent of all medical and biological engineers. The American Institution for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) this week announced the induction of Dong Xu, a Bond LSC principal investigator and Shumaker Endowed Professor in the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering. “Election to the AIMBE College of Fellows is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to…
March 18, 2020
Turning Winter into Summer: How Greenhouses Work in the Winter
The Sears Greenhouse Complex at the University of Missouri. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Picture this. It’s 25 degrees Fahrenheit outside and snow is falling in Columbia. The weathermen have projected 4 inches of snow in the next 24 hours. As wind whips the snow around, students hope the schools call a snow day the next day. Snow starts to accumulate as the sun sets and people all throughout town are staying inside, some eating soup with their families, others curled up with a…
March 13, 2020
#IAmScience Hsin-Yeh Hsieh
By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC Some scientists go into research for basic science, such as finding an enzyme and figuring out its functions and properties. Others like Hsin-Yeh Hsieh, gravitate toward applied sciences where they use what they know to develop technology. “Because I can use everything I learned in science as building blocks to create a technology that actually can do something and make impacts in real life, that’s what I like about science,” said Hsieh, a research scientist in the George Stewart lab at Bond LSC. Hsieh began her science journey in Taiwan, where she…
March 4, 2020
Movement is the Key
Anand Chandrasekhar It’s an asset to be able to visualize and think about the nervous system from the perspective of an electrical engineer. Cell biologist Anand Chandrasekhar — whose work focuses on the movement of neurons within the brainstem of mice and zebrafish, as well as on the consequences of that movement or lack of movement for the animal’s behavior— brings that angle to his work all the way from his undergraduate…
March 2, 2020
A NEET Connection
Arabidopsis growing in Ron Mittler’s lab. | photo by Becca Wolf, Bond LSC Protein important in balancing iron and reactive oxygen in plant and cancer cells By Becca Wolf | Bond LSC You might tend to think durability is more of an issue in building a car or engineering a building, but environmental stress makes resilience vital for plants, too. In the world of understanding and engineering more durable crops, scientists recently identified a protein that’s key to some of that resilience in a neat way. Actually, it’s literally a NEET protein. Ron Mittler, a Bond Life…