Life Sciences Week
April 3, 2017
Hanson to explain why broken metabolites matter at Life Sciences Week
By Jinghong Chen | Bond Life Sciences Center Andrew Hanson, right, will speak Friday, April 14 in Bond LSC’s Monsanto Auditorium as the 2017 Dr. Charles W Gehrke speaker. | Photo by University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences People often think of metabolism as a perfect network. But that assumption is simply not accurate. Andrew Hanson, an eminent scholar and professor at the University of Florida, describes the misunderstanding as “the power of a paradigm.” American biochemist Albert Lehninger spread the misunderstanding in his classic textbook “Biochemistry”, in which the message he…
May 8, 2015
Unlocking plants’ metabolic thermostat — award-winning LSW posters
Matthew Salie would like to see chubbier plants. “You’ve probably never really seen a fat plant before, right?” said Salie, a fourth year MU graduate student in biochemistry. “Humans, we make plenty of extra fat and store that as energy. But plants don’t really need to do that — they make just as much as they need, and that’s about it.” Salie studies plant metabolism with Bond LSC researcher Jay Thelen, an associate professor of biochemistry. He’s one of 25 winners honored for research presented during Missouri Life Sciences Week 2015. The Thelen lab looks for ways to increase the…
April 9, 2015
Life Sciences Week preview: Doing more with less
A simple virtue lies at the heart of Xuemin (Sam) Wang’s research: thrift. “A good way to think of it is how to increase output without demanding more inputs,” Wang said. Wang, the E. Desmond Lee and Family Fund endowed professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, studies plant membrane lipids. His lab is focused on understanding the relationship between oil production and plant stresses such as drought and nutrient deficiency. Wang will speak during the 31st annual Missouri Life Sciences Week, a yearly celebration of MU’s…