Scientific pursuits often require examining a problem from different angles in order to gain a complete understanding. Such an undertaking often requires multiple researchers, each with a unique skill set. But what happens when certain voices are ignored over and over, in favor of others? It breeds inequality that weakens our science and our sense of community.

The National Institutes of Health have awarded a $2.2 million grant to researchers at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. The four-year grant will be used to develop more precise genome editing technologies for gene therapy applications.

FUTURE-MINDS-QB, a bridge program streamlining a path from a master’s degree at Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, to a doctoral degree at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has received a T32 training grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As part of a campus-wide initiative to increase diversity, a collaboration with Fisk University was recently approved for an additional five years of continued financial support from the Office of Executive Associate Chancellor for Administration and University Relations and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research (OVCRI). Founder Professor of Physics Jun Song (ACPP) will oversee hands-on bioinformatics, data analysis, and biophysics training for under-represented minority undergraduate students from Fisk University, a minority-serving institution (MSI) in Nashville, Tennessee.

In a new study in cells, University of Illinois researchers have adapted CRISPR gene-editing technology to cause the cell’s internal machinery to skip over a small portion of a gene when transcribing it into a template for protein building. This gives researchers a way not only to eliminate a mutated gene sequence, but to influence how the gene is expressed and regulated.