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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Pictured here, left to right: Gabriel Popescu, Hyunjoon Kong, Martha Gillette, Taher Saif, EBICS Director Roger Kamm of MIT, Rashid Bashir, and Program Coordinator Carrie Kouadio.

Creating bio-machines to improve health

A team of researchers developed a new broad-spectrum antibiotic that kills bacteria by punching holes in their membranes. Front row, from left: Materials Science and Engineering Professor Jianjun Cheng and postdoctoral researcher Yan Bao. Back row, from left: postdoctoral researcher Menghua Xiong, graduate students Ziyuan Song and Rachael Mansbach, Materials Science and Engineering Professor Andrew Ferguson, and Biochemistry Professor Lin-Feng Chen.

Bacterial hole puncher could be new broad-spectrum antibiotic

IGB Director Gene Robinson and colleagues found that honey bee larvae raised in aggressive hives are more likely to be aggressive themselves when they emerge as adults.

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

IGB HONORS RENAMING

IGB honors renaming with symposium in memory of Carl Woese

4D nucleome project

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

Computer simulation of the emergence of homochirality. The vertical axis represents space, here in only one dimension for simplicity, while the horizontal axis is time. The colors represent the degree of chirality, with red being (e.g.) right and blue being (e.g.) left. At the beginning the mixture has equal numbers of right and left-handed molecules, and during the time evolution, the red and blue phases compete over the spatial domain, resulting in the eventual dominance of the blue chiral phase.

Straight up, with a twist: New model derives homochirality

A cat’s neuron stained with Golgi’s technique as drawn by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

Brains work via their genes just as much as their neurons

Donald Ort

Crop sciences professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés led a study that adds to the evidence that viruses are alive and share a long evolutionary history with other life forms.

Study adds to evidence that viruses are alive

Vijay Singh

Biofuel crops grown at the University of Illinois.

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

University of Illinois chemistry professor Wilfred van der Donk (left), postdoctoral researcher Kou-San Ju, microbiology professor William Metcalf and their colleagues used genome mining to discover many new natural products quickly and inexpensively.

Genome mining effort discovers 19 new natural products in four years

Karen Sears, Associate Professor at the School of Integrative Biology and IGB faculty member, coauthored the new study.

Before nature selects, gene networks steer a course for evolution

Chemistry professor Jeffrey Moore, graduate student Joshua Grolman, and materials science and engineering professor Kristopher Kilian, who led a research team to create a new synthetic tissue environment for more realistic cell biology research.

New synthetic tumor environments make cancer research more realistic

Professor and Bliss Faculty Scholar Sergei Maslov, left, with biophysicist William Studier.

Illinois researchers build genomic platform to further understand E. coli