2020-02-21
- Brenda Wilson, Professor of Microbiology and Associate Director for MCB Undergraduate Education has been elected to the 2020 Class of Academy Fellows.
2020-02-20 - Erik Nelson, Assistant Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology, has been named the 2020-2021 Gunsalus Scholar by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for his work on cholesterol metabolism and cancer.
2020-02-10 - The Freeman laboratory (Cell and Developmental Biology) delineates a molecular chaperone-dependent mechanism for selectively mobilizing gene loci through the nuclear actin matrix. Their findings were published in Developmental Cell.
2020-02-10 - Autophagy or “self-eating” is a fundamental biological process by which cells digest and recycle cellular components for survival of the cells under nutrient-deprived conditions. Autophagy must be tightly controlled since deficient autophagy is associated with many diseases and aging, while excessive autophagy is also harmful because it promotes cell death.
2020-02-06 - Many epithelial tissues are classified as being squamous, cuboidal, or columnar based upon the height of their lateral membranes. CDB researchers Yuou Wang and Bill Brieher identified a protein known as CD2AP as a key factor necessary for building up the lateral membrane.
2020-02-05 - Recent work from the Laboratory in Cell and Developmental Biology was featured in the Journal of Cell Biology.
2020-02-04 - Epithelial cells use an adhesion molecule known as E-cadherin to help build extensive cell-cell adhesive contacts leading to cohesive sheets of cells that separate two different environments. But what happens if the adhesive bonds holding the cells together fail? CDB researchers John Li, Vivian Tang, and Bill Brieher discovered an actin dependent repair mechanism that operates continuously in...
2020-01-30 - ChBE professor Hyunjoon (Joon) Kong recently received two grants from the NSF to fund interdisciplinary research at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, including a look at how neurons and muscle cells communicate with each other and also to develop a drug delivery system for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. He will be collaborating with Martha Gillette, professor of Cell...
2020-01-16 - HIV-1 affects and kills millions of people globally, but not enough information exists regarding the types of cells that HIV-1 targets in different tissues or the virus’s mechanism of spreading throughout the body. Viruses often ride the body’s circulatory systems to scatter throughout an organism and appear in different tissues to infect cells; however, not much is known about HIV-1’s mechanism...
2020-01-13 - In biology, it is generally believed that a protein’s sequence determines its structure, which in turn determines its function. However, in the case of membrane proteins, the reality is more complicated than this simple statement. “In recent years, the importance of a protein’s local environment has been increasingly recognized, but the molecular-level details have not been quite clear”, says Dr...
2020-01-10 - On December 12, 2019, the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology held its annual Winter Holiday Party. Faculty, staff, and graduate students came together in the Alice Campbell Alumni Center to celebrate and recognize our successes throughout the year. Coordinated by Shawna Smith and Holly Mansfield, all were treated to a night of music, food, and games.
2020-01-07 - Scientists have developed new drug compounds that thwart the pro-cancer activity of FOXM 1, a transcription factor that regulates the activity of dozens of genes. The new compounds suppress tumor growth in human cells and in mouse models of several types of human breast cancer.
2019-12-31 - Professor Daniel Llano is a neurologist at the Carle Neuroscience Institute and has been a faculty member in the MIP department since 2010. He obtained his BS, PhD, and MD at UIUC before moving to Massachusetts to pursue his clinical training at Harvard Medical School. He later became a post-doctoral research fellow and instructor at the University of Chicago focusing on cognitive and behavioral...
2019-12-31 - Professor Lori Raetzman joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Since joining, the Raetzman group has produced highly impactful work regarding the development and function of both the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus. Over the past 14 years, students from the Raetzman lab have won many prestigious awards and training grants, and have gone on to careers in academia,...
2019-12-17 - The Tajkhorshid lab used computational microscopy to investigate how lipids can influence the structure and function of protein channels in cells. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.