Stories about discoveries, advancements, and forward-thinking ideas from WID’s research areas, hubs, and key collaborators.
A team of researchers at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery are combining computational and laboratory methods to more efficiently reprogram differentiated cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. Their work was published in Cell Reports on May 7, 2019.
WID Director Jo Handelsman and biochemistry professor Ophelia Venturelli are part of a multi-university interdisciplinary team awarded a grant to study information transmission in microbial communities and how biological networks communicate.
WID’s Tom Turng envisions a future in which surgeons can order mass-produced artificial blood vessels that arrive ready to use in bypass surgeries.
A growing understanding of microbial communities and their influence on human health or crop productivity has led to the dream of changing these communities to produce benefits. New research at WID addresses this head-on.
WID’s John Yin and colleagues have described initial steps toward achieving chemistries that encode information in a variety of conditions that might mimic the environment of prehistoric Earth.
A paper published in eLife this week by an interdisciplinary team at WID describes new methods for reproducibly manufacturing brain and spinal cord organoids with strict control over morphogenic and developmental processes.
Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, WID’s Seyfullah Kotil and Kalin Vetsigian uncover an assembly mechanism that can lead to the spontaneous formation of microbial communities.
A new approach to climate data analysis hopes to improve regional forecasts.
An international team of researchers including WID scientists has discovered new mechanisms to regulate the activity of a gene essential in metabolism, with implications for pathologies related to alterations in glucose levels in the body, such as diabetes or metastasis in some types of cancer.
With Wisconsin’s short growing seasons, reducing a plant’s life cycle and completing the season earlier “could be very important for many crops.”
A team of researchers is developing a new approach for maintaining open blood vessels in the wake of surgeries such as angioplasties or bypasses.
Peter Lewis and his research group at WID study how mutations in DNA-organizing histone proteins lead to cancer development.
Much remains mysterious in the realm of machine learning. The next generation of machine learning algorithms is expected to not only bolster national defense capabilities, but also benefit civilians.
A new paper in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews describes how the steps of virus reproduction contribute to timing and productivity of cell infection.
Laurent Lessard is working to improve the algorithms and computer software that keep the modern world running smoothly.
Karen Schloss and Laurent Lessard are working on a method for matching colors to people’s expectations to send the right message — starting with the best colors for waste and recycling bins.
WID researcher Shaoqin Sarah Gong is working to more safely deliver a variety of drugs to treat cancer, heart disease and even blindness.
Newly characterized roles for plant histone deacetylases have implications for growth and development. The Zhong Lab explores the influence of the enzymes in both transcription and translation.
WID researchers are engaging in fundamental mathematical and statistical research to support the development, testing, and fine-tuning of tools for the future, finding new ways to make sense of the mountains of data that are available in the 21st century and bringing into view important applications on the horizon.
Error rates as high as 50 percent are a problem when the goal is to correct typos in the DNA that cause genetic disease. Now, a team of researchers led by WID’s Kris Saha has made the fix less mistake-prone.
WID researcher Sushmita Roy and collaborators at UW–Madison and the University of Florida will use a $7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study how some plants partner with bacteria to create usable nitrogen and to transfer this ability to the bioenergy crop poplar.
Karen Schloss talks about the psychology behind color preferences in an interview for Artsy.
Xuehua Zhong recently received an outstanding investigator award from NIH via the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) mechanism to support her research. She talked about how she uses plants to study epigenetics in an interview with Grow magazine.
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) researchers Rupa Sridharan and Sushmita Roy are combining their expertise in regenerative biology and computational biology to better understand how cells transition from one type to another through gene regulation.
Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence by which algorithms are “trained” to analyze new information using existing data. Researchers are using it to identify individuals with a genetic condition known as fragile X premutation.
