A living system, like any complex entity, is more than the sum of its parts. It can be as simple as a virus or as complex as an ecosystem. Researchers at WID aspire to gain an understanding of how such systems function, as well as how they adapt to and shape their environments over different time scales.
An interdisciplinary group of engineers, computer scientists, physicists, and evolutionary biologists take a multi-pronged approach to understanding living systems. We develop and combine experimental and computational methods to study diverse problems, ranging from interactions between organisms (e.g., between hosts and pathogens, and within diverse microbial communities) and interaction networks within organisms (e.g., regulatory and metabolic interactions). A common theme to complex biological systems research at WID is to view these systems through the lens of evolution.
WID and Saha Lab alumnus, and current postdoc at the Morgridge Institute for Research, Amritava Das anticipates that he will put his engineering and bioscience training to use exploring the sometimes knotty connections between science, national security, and finance.
A new publication from the Xuehua Zhong’s group at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and the genetics department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison clarifies an important epigenetic mechanism in plants that will help researchers better understand the epigenomes of both plants and animals.
Tianyi “Herry” Jin, an undergraduate in John Yin’s lab group at WID and the department of chemical and biological engineering, published discoveries about viruses in the journal Integrative Biology.
WID’s John Yin is part of a team assembling February workshops on predictive intelligence for pandemic prevention.
Using an ingenious microscopic retinal patch, eye researchers at UW‒Madison will develop and test a new way to treat United States military personnel blinded in combat. WID’s Sarah Gong is a collaborator on the project.
WID’s Randolph Ashton, Gavin Knight, Benjamin Knudsen, and Nisha Iyer take top honors from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s Innovation Awards. Their work, Superior Neural Tissue Models for Disease Modeling, Drug Development and More, was selected from more than 400 innovation disclosures.
A promising platform developed by the Saha Lab at WID advances the CRISPR genome editing field and could lead to effective treatments for many diseases.
By combing the ocean for antimicrobials, scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have discovered a new antifungal compound that efficiently targets multi-drug-resistant strains of deadly fungi without toxic side effects in mice. WID postdoc Marc Chevrette is part of the team that published the finding in Science.
A cross-institutional team including WID’s John Yin is creating a computational model to guide the development of bladder therapeutics.
Assistant professor of plant pathology Claudia Solís-Lemus is a recipient of funding from the Department of Energy to develop statistical theory and tools for computational biology.
Lena Vincent is a graduate student in David Baum’s lab at WID. She studies the origin of life by searching for life-like behaviors in systems of molecules.
A team of UW-Madison researchers led by Discovery Fellow Wendy Crone has created a powerful tool to help assess what experimental factors help to produce stem cell-generated cardiomyocytes that behave like adult heart cells.
WID’s Shaoqin “Sarah” Gong is a collaborator on a paper published in Nature Communications in which UW engineers constructed a functional microwave amplifier circuit on a substrate of cellulose nanofibril paper, a wood product.
John Yin is working to find out whether “junk” particles produced by mouse viruses exist in human coronaviruses, and whether they may be the key to understanding how the viruses spread and interact with host cells.
WID’s John Yin, who uses experimental and computational methods to understand how viruses spread, is working on several projects that could have a direct bearing on COVID-19.
WID Director Jo Handelsman shared a conversation on Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda and on WUWM about soil and microbes.
WID researchers have developed a computational tool that can accurately predict the three-dimensional interactions between regions of human chromosomes.
Discovery Fellow David Baum leads a team that has cultivated lifelike chemical reactions while pioneering a new strategy for studying the origin of life.
An interdisciplinary pair of WID researchers has developed a new nanocapsule delivery method for delivering the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool. The new system could be used for many types of gene therapies.
Claudia Solís-Lemus and Daniel Pimentel-Alarcón are experts in statistics and machine learning, augmenting WID’s data science expertise.
WID researchers used a collaborative combination of computational and wet lab experimental techniques to find a connection between a transcription factor and a neurodevelopment gene.
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.
A new group centered at WID hopes to coordinate the dozens of labs that are addressing some aspect of astrobiology and inspire others to join the work. A public lecture series this spring is part of the effort.
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 new hubs—Data Science, Multi-Omics, and Illuminating Discovery—represent a new path forward for collaborative research projects and fields.
