2019-09-03
- Emad Tajkhorshid(Biochemistry) has been awarded the 2020 Thomas E. Thompson award for his seminal contributions to advancing our understanding of membrane structure and function.
2019-08-21 - Molecular and integrative physiology professor Hee Jung Chung, her postdoctoral fellow Eung Chang Kim, Psychology professor Justin Rhodes, and their colleagues discovered that heterozygous loss of KCNQ2 potassium channel gene induces autism-associated behaviors in mice including social avoidance, repetitive behaviors, and obsessive and compulsive-like behaviors.
2019-08-14 - Graduate student Colleen Bianco and Professor Carin Vanderpool spearheaded a study that centered on how E. coli and Salmonella bacteria use RNA-based regulatory mechanisms to modify their membrane lipids in response to different stimuli. Their findings, with collaborator Kathrin Frölich (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany) as a co-author, were published in a paper titled “Bacterial...
2019-07-31 - Led by Sisi He from the Erik Nelson lab, researchers have found that a metabolite of cholesterol (27-hydroxycholesterol; 27HC) was essential for the growth of ovarian tumors in mice.
2019-07-29 - Daniel Llano (Molecular and Integrative Physiology) has been named a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. The young scientists and engineers receive up to a five-year research grant to further their study in support of critical...
2019-07-09 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – I am in Govindjee’s office suite and I don’t know where to look. Govindjee, a professor emeritus of plant biology who goes by the one name only, is a collector. There are layers of history here: artifacts and papers, books and photographs. There also are homemade scientific instruments that look like plumbing elbows, tiny satellites or props from vintage sci-fi movies. The...
2019-07-03 - A Bruker 9.4 Tesla preclinical animal MRI system will be sited at the Beckman Institute. The addition of the system to the institute’s Biomedical Imaging Center will aid in research in many areas, including brain development and function, and cellular mechanisms in cancer. The installation project will begin this fall and is expected to take a year.
2019-06-29 - Rhanor Gillette (Molecular and Integrative Physiology) is part of a team that has received a Multi-university Research Initiative (MURI) award. According to the Coordinated Science Laboratory at Illinois, this $7.5 million award is for building a Cyberoctopus, a software equivalent to the marine animal that will help understand and leverage an octopus's ability to conduct distributed inference...
2019-05-29 - Auinash Kalsotra (Biochemistry) and Supriya Prasanth (Cell and Developmental Biology) received 2019 Campus Distinguished Promotion Awards from the University of Illinois Office of the Provost. These awards celebrate scholars whose contributions have been extraordinary in terms of quality of work and overall achievement.
2019-05-13 - From weakly electric fish to a robotic cockroach to a novel approach to using wireless networks for emergency response, Mark E. Nelson’s research career exemplifies the success of an interdisciplinary approach through his work in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Beckman Institute.
2019-05-13 - Researchers report that a protein known to be important to protein synthesis also influences muscle regeneration and regrowth in an unexpected manner. The discovery, reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could one day lead to new methods for treating disorders that result in muscle weakness and loss of muscle mass, the researchers said.
2019-04-24 - Professor William Brieher has been selected by an awards committee to receive the LAS Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, alongside four other professors at Illinois. This honor grants the recipients $1,000 to support their teaching and research, while a one-time increment of $2,000 will be added to the annual salary base of each recipient.
2019-04-22 - The latest paper by the Kuzminov lab investigates the mechanism of thymineless death, which is a common mode of action of anti-cancer and anti-bacterial drugs. The findings were published in a paper titled "Sources of thymidine and analogs fueling futile damage-repair cycles and ss-gap accumulation during thymine starvation in Escherichia coli" in DNA Repair.
2019-04-08 - The latest paper by the Shapiro lab looks at the effect of mutations in the estrogen receptor on the growth and spread of breast cancer cells. The findings were published in a paper titled "Estrogen-independent Myc overexpression confers endocrine therapy resistance on breast cancer cells expressing ERαY537S and ERαD538G" in Cancer Letters.
2019-04-03 - Microbiologist Ralph Wolfe contributed to a study of microbes that led to the discovery of a third superkingdom, or domain, of life: the archaea. Wolfe, a professor emeritus of microbiology at the University of Illinois, died March 26 in Urbana. He was 97.