Stories about discoveries, advancements, and forward-thinking ideas from WID’s research areas, hubs, and key collaborators.
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.
In a paper in Cell Systems, Sushmita Roy and colleagues develop a probabilistic graphical model-based method, multi-species regulatory network learning that uses a phylogenetic framework to infer regulatory networks in multiple species simultaneously.
WKOW Channel 27 highlights Randolph Ashton’s NSF grant to create blank model for spinal cells.
Kevin Ponto, a Principal Investigator in the Living Environments Lab is partnering with the Dane County Sheriff’s Office on a two-year, federally funded study to measure the effectiveness of virtual reality tools and 3-D-capture technology on crime scene investigations.
WID researchers Stephen Wright and Robert Nowak are part of a UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative project to create machine learning tools that dramatically reduce the time and cost associated with screening compounds for therapeutic relevance.
Systems Biology researcher Kalin Vetsigian and graduate student Ye Xu recently published findings in Nature’s Scientific Reports about the stochasticity of growth within Streptomycetes spore communities.
WID scientists are combining theory with experiment to try to understand how life could arise from lifelike chemical reactions under the right conditions.
In a paper forthcoming in the journal Cognitive Science, Living Environments Lab professor Karen Schloss and her colleagues investigated whether and why color preferences change according to the season.
Kevin Ponto, PI in the Living Environments Lab, explains virtual reality for Blue Sky Science.
Kris Saha illuminates the inner workings of gene editing.
The podcast “Is DNA the Basis for all Life in the Universe?” produced by The Naked Scientists, an affiliate of the BBC at Cambridge University features John Denu speaking of his recent findings on how the gut microbiome affects DNA expression.
Systems Biology researcher Sushmita Roy is leading an effort putting computational methods to work characterizing the gene regulatory networks responsible for cell differentiation.
The upshot of the study from researchers in the Epigenetics theme at WID is another indictment of the so-called Western diet, high in saturated fats, sugar, and red meat.
Xuehua Zhong describes an epigenetic mechanism behind plant aging for the first time in a ground-breaking new paper in eLife.
BIONATES Lih-Sheng “Tom” Turng works in tandem with Morgridge Institute for Research scientist James Thomson to create scaffolds for small diameter arteries.
Kris Saha with colleagues David Beebe and Christian Capitini aim to develop improved methods for making CAR T-Cells with a two-year grant from the NSF.
WID Optimization researchers have partnered with faculty across campus to work on ways to use computers to make better use of human brain power.
Systems Biology researchers Deborah Chasman and Sushmita Roy are using machine learning to identify virus and pathogenicity-specific regulatory networks which may guide the design of effective therapeutics for infectious diseases. The work is described in a recent paper in PLOS Computational Biology.
WID Principal Investigator Peter Lewis honored for work on modifying histones to treat cancer.
