[ ] U.S. farmers have long hoped to extend sugarcane’s growing range northward from the Gulf coast, substantially increasing the land available for sugar and biofuels. Several hybrid…
[ ] The first human inhabitants of the Americas lived in a time thousands of years before the first written records, and the story of their transcontinental migration is the subject…
[ ] Patients suffering from chronic cardiopulmonary diseases could soon have a solution to help them accurately monitor their health and warn doctors at the first sign of trouble. By…
[ ] How can we meet the accelerating food needs of the world’s population, without increasing the amount of land used for farming? By making plants better neighbors, and borrowing…
[ ] Last week’s cloudy skies and frequent rain contributed to an unusually wet central Illinois summer, but could not dampen the enthusiasm for science displayed by 24 middle school…
[ ] While teaching a class on coarse-graining methods in physics, James O’Dwyer realized that the technique could be used to understand how microbes evolve over time. The results,…
[ ] Historically, successful trait selection in plant breeding has involved manual measurement of individual plants. This requirement limits the number of plants that can be evaluated…
[ ] Each cell in the body contains a whole genome, yet the data packed into a few DNA molecules could fill a hard drive. As more people have their DNA sequenced, that data will…
[ ] Next generation DNA sequencing technologies have turned the vision of precision medicine into a plausible reality, but also threaten to overwhelm computing infrastructures with…
[ ] The University of Illinois announced that it has been awarded a 2-year, $3.1 million grant from the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The U. of I. will be the…
[ ] How relevant are obscure-sounding topics such as cell division, genomics of plant breeding, and bioengineering for the daily lives of a group of local community members? As a…
[ ] Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have, for the first time, uncovered the complex interdependence and orchestration of metabolic reactions, gene…
[ ] Director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology Gene E. Robinson received an honorary doctoral degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his scientific…
[ ] Update: The petition is available online. Recent genomic research has prompted a petition that calls for the reclassification of African elephants from one threatened species to…
[ ] Inside every cell that makes up a diminutive fruit fly is a vast, dynamic network of information—the genome whose ~15,000 genes allow that cell to function. In a study…
[ ] For hundreds of years, the Anio Novus aqueduct carried water 87 km (54 miles) from the Aniene River of the Apennine Mountains down into Rome. Built between AD 38 and 52, scholars…
[ ] Genome-editing Proteins Seek and Find with a Slide and a Hop Searching a whole genome for one particular sequence is like trying to fish a specific piece from the box of a billion…
[ ] More than 500,000 people in the United States die each year of cancer-related causes. Now, emerging research has identified the mechanism behind one of the most common mutations…
[ ] Explaining the evolution of insect society, with sterile society members displaying extreme levels of altruism, has long been a major scientific challenge, dating back to Charles…
[ ] Digital memory versus analog: it’s a question that’s plagued music lovers for years. In biology, however, the focus is overwhelmingly digital: 0 or 1, on or off, genes expressed…