Immune System
March 23, 2017
Why self-defense turns self-attack
By Jinghong Chen | Bond Life Sciences Center Mahmoud Khalafalla, a Ph.D. student at Weisman’s lab, is isolating RNA from salivary glands of Sjögren’s syndrome mouse model to look for the expression of pro-inflammatory genes. | photo by Jinghong Chen, Bond LSC Our immune system is often the key to our health. Everyday, it works to protect us from foreign invaders such as bacteria and virus, but what happens when it attacks our own tissues? Gary Weisman, a Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at the Bond Life Sciences Center, is working to advance our understanding of…
March 1, 2016
Unmasking the unknown
Scientists explore genetic similarities between plants and mice University of Missouri PhD Candidate Daniel L. Leuchtman peers through an Arabidopsis plant. Leuchtman has been experimenting with replacing a gene in the plants immune system with a similar gene from mice. | Photograph by Justin L. Stewart/MU Bond Life Sciences Center By Justin L. Stewart | MU Bond Life Sciences Center Almost two-thirds of what makes a human a human and a fly a fly are the same, according to the NIH genome research institute. If recent research at the University of Missouri’s Bond…