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Illinois IGB

News Archive [2015]

Using Game Theory to Help Prevent Pregnancy Disorders

[ ] Life is a game. From the moment sperm fertilizes egg, you are either winning or losing. Using game theory--the study of competition and conflict--researchers can quantify the…

Illinois awarded $5M to increase water use efficiency in bioenergy sorghum

[ ] The University of Illinois has been awarded a 3-year, $5 million grant from the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy as part of its OPEN 2015 funding initiative (ARPA-E…

Can male prairie voles blame promiscuity on poor memory?

[ ] Once male prairie voles have found a mate, what makes some stay at home, while others stray? The latest insight in a canonical scientific saga of genes, brain, social behavior,…

Stephen Long to Speak at Paris Climate Convention

[ ] Agricultural innovation is needed now — not later — to avoid food shortages in a world with an ever-changing climate and a growing population. That’s the message University of…

Prof. of Molecular and Cellular Biology William Metcalf Named AAAS Fellow

[ ] Six researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), including William…

Ground-level ozone reduces maize and soybean yields

[ ] Despite government regulations, ground-level ozone – an odorless gas that forms as polluting nitrogen oxides drift in sunlight across the countryside – continues to threaten crop…

Scientists uncover mechanism that propels liver dev. after birth

[ ] Any expectant mother will tell you that she wants her baby's organs to develop properly in the womb. What she may not realize, however, is that a child's internal organs continue…

Creating bio-machines to improve health

[ ] By studying the behavior of living cells and combining them with synthetic tissue, researchers are creating “biological machines” to deliver drugs more effectively, function as…

Bacterial hole puncher could be new broad-spectrum antibiotic

[ ] Bacteria have many methods of adapting to resist antibiotics, but a new class of spiral polypeptides developed at the University of Illinois targets one thing no bacterium can…

Wimps or warriors? Honey bee larvae absorb social culture of hive

[ ] Even as larvae, honey bees are tuned in to the social culture of the hive, becoming more or less aggressive depending on who raises them, researchers report in the journal…

IGB honors renaming with symposium in memory of Carl Woese

[ ] The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology’s recent symposium, "Looking in the right direction: Carl Woese and the New Biology," was conceived as a way to celebrate the…

University of Illinois awarded $8M from NIH to study nuclear structure

[ ] For years genome-mapping technology has understood DNA as a linear code, but that’s not how it exists in the cell: it’s tangled up in 3D inside the nucleus, with higher- and lower…

Straight up, with a twist: New model derives homochirality

[ ] Life is quirky. Although the molecules that make up all living things obey physical and chemical laws, they do so with a puzzling twist. How did the distinctive molecular features…

Brains work via their genes just as much as their neurons

[ ] It’s not headline news that our brains are the seat of our thoughts and feelings. The brain is a body’s decision-maker, the pilot of its actions and the engineer that keeps all…

Study adds to evidence that viruses are alive

[ ] A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, researchers report. The study offers the first reliable…

It’s time to stop thinking in terms of food versus fuel

[ ] Whether you have taken a side or a backseat in the discussion, the “food versus fuel” debate affects us all. Some say growing more biofuel crops today will decrease greenhouse gas…

Genome mining effort discovers 19 new natural products in four years

[ ] It took two postdoctoral researchers, a lab technician, four undergraduates and their faculty advisors only four years – a blink of an eye in pharmaceutical terms – to scour a…

Before nature selects, gene networks steer a course for evolution

[ ] Natural selection is a race to reproduce, a competition between individuals with varying traits that helps direct the evolution of a species. As scientists begin to explore the…

New synthetic tumor environments make cancer research more realistic

[ ] Tumors are notoriously difficult to study in their natural habitat – body tissues – but a new synthetic tissue environment may give cancer researchers the next-best look at tumor…

Illinois researchers build genomic platform to further understand E. coli

[ ] In August 2015, three children in three separate northern Indiana counties were sickened by Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one of them died. Bacterial outbreaks like these send…