Two Graduate Students Win Awards at Research Live! Competition

Ipek Tasan (Biochemistry) won First Place, and Robin Holland (Microbiology and Veterinary Medicine) won the People's Choice Award.

Scientists uncover mechanism that propels liver development after birth

Assistant professor Auinash Kalsotra and collegues report that liver cells utilize a mechanism called "alternative splicing," which alters how genes are translated into the proteins that guide postnatal organ development. Their findings are published in Nature Communications.

Professor Emad Tajkhorshid named University Scholar

The University Scholars program recognizes excellence in teaching, scholarship and service and provides $15,000 to each scholar for each of three years to enhance his or her academic career. Read more about Tajkhorshid's current work in this article.

Dr. Sligar, Director of the School of MCB, has been awarded the Herbert A. Sober Lectureship

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology has selected Dr. Stephen Sligar as the winner for the Herbert A. Sober Lectureship. The award recognizes outstanding biochemical and molecular biological research, with particular emphasis on development of methods and techniques to aid in...

Kevin Yum’s outstanding undergraduate career

Kevin Yum graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry. Upon graduation, he received Highest Distinction and the William T. and Lynn Jackson Senior Thesis Award from the Biochemistry department for the research he completed...

Biochemistry graduate student wins top prize for poster at Annual RNA Society Meeting

Amruta Bhate, a 3rd year biochemistry graduate student in the Kalsotra lab, has won the best poster award at the 2015 Annual RNA Society Meeting for her discovery of a previously unexplored function for alternative splicing in liver maturation.

Biochemistry alumus, Dr. Seyed Torabi, who did his PhD in the lab of Dr. Yi Lu, has published his dissertation research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sodium ions (Na+) play diverse and important roles in biological processes, and yet few sensors with high sensitivity and selectivity for Na+ over other competing metal ions have been reported. In this study, the authors reported the first highly selective, sensitive, and efficient Na+-specific...

Biochemistry graduate student wins NSF pre-doctoral fellowship

The Department of Biochemistry congratulates first-year graduate student Mara Livezey on winning a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides three years of pre-doctoral funding, which will support her work in Professor David Shapiro’s lab.

A new RNA repair complex employing a “one-stop shopping” repair mechanism

Biochemistry graduate student Pei Wang and Associate Professor Raven Huang have discovered a new bacterial RNA repair complex. The structure of the 270-kDa RNA repair complex revealed that it is built like a shopping mall, and RNA repair can be achieved having the damaged RNA visiting four active...

New drug stalls estrogen receptor-positive cancer cells and shrinks tumors

Biochemistry researchers in Dr. David Shapiro's lab, and a study team including researchers from the department of food science and human nutrition, the department of molecular and integrative physiology, the College of Medicine and the Cancer Center, have developed a new drug that kills estrogen...