Small But Mighty: Nanoparticles Can Deliver More Types of Drugs, More Safely
WID researcher Shaoqin Sarah Gong is working to more safely deliver a variety of drugs to treat cancer, heart disease and even blindness.
Featured Science
Stories about discoveries, advancements, and forward-thinking ideas from WID’s research areas, hubs, and key collaborators.
Multifunctional Plant Enzymes Promote Protein Production
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.
Building Better Tools for the Big Data Boom
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.
All-in-One Repair Kit Makes CRISPR Gene Editing More Precise
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.
Weaning Crops from Nitrogen Fertilizers: Examining Evolution’s Innovations
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.
Why Blue is the World’s Favorite Color
Karen Schloss talks about the psychology behind color preferences in an interview for Artsy.
The “Icing” on the DNA
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.
Connecting the Dots: a New Method to Understand Cell Type Transitions
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 Can Detect a Genetic Disorder from Speech Recordings
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.
Inference and Evolutionary Analysis of Genome-Scale Regulatory Networks in Large Phylogenies
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.
Grant Funds Creation of Spinal Tissue from Scratch in UW-Madison Lab
WKOW Channel 27 highlights Randolph Ashton’s NSF grant to create blank model for spinal cells.
Catching up: UW-Madison, Sheriff’s Office team up to study 3-D crime-scene tools
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.
You may also like … Algorithms that improve drug discovery
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.
Phenotypic variability and community interactions of germinating Streptomyces spores
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.
Experiments Test How Easy Life Itself Might Be
WID scientists are combining theory with experiment to try to understand how life could arise from lifelike chemical reactions under the right conditions.
As The Seasons Change, So Do Our Color Preferences
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.
How Does Virtual Reality Work?
Kevin Ponto, PI in the Living Environments Lab, explains virtual reality for Blue Sky Science.
Watching gene editing at work to develop precision therapies
Kris Saha illuminates the inner workings of gene editing.
Gut bugs affect DNA expression
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.
Deciphering Gene Regulatory Networks
Systems Biology researcher Sushmita Roy is leading an effort putting computational methods to work characterizing the gene regulatory networks responsible for cell differentiation.
Gut’s Microbial Community Shown to Influence Host Gene Expression
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.
Aging Leaves: How Epigenetic Regulation Gives Rise to the Signature Colors of Fall
Xuehua Zhong describes an epigenetic mechanism behind plant aging for the first time in a ground-breaking new paper in eLife.
Can Artery ‘Banks’ Transform Vascular Medicine?
BIONATES Lih-Sheng “Tom” Turng works in tandem with Morgridge Institute for Research scientist James Thomson to create scaffolds for small diameter arteries.
Smart Cancer Therapies: Teaching the Body’s Own T-cells to Attack Tumors
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.