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’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.
From On Wisconsin Magazine: UW-Madison students are joining the hunt for new antibiotics in their introductory biology coursework and becoming part of the Tiny Earth network, based at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
With Wisconsin’s short growing seasons, reducing a plant’s life cycle and completing the season earlier “could be very important for many crops.”
Ten highly innovative projects have been chosen to receive University of Wisconsin–Madison Data Science Initiative funding, including two led by Wisconsin Institute for Discovery investigators.
Tiny Earth’s 2018 symposium will feature experts on the front lines of the antimicrobial resistance crisis.
Investigators from WID are among the recipients of the latest round of UW2020 awards.
A new paper in Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews describes how the steps of virus reproduction contribute to timing and productivity of cell infection.
One of the UW Carbone Cancer Center members presenting is WID’s Peter Lewis. His work focuses on how genes are turned on and off during embryonic development, and how misregulation in those genes can lead to some childhood cancers.
The scholarship recognizes promising undergraduates who plan to pursue a PhD or MD/PhD followed by a research career in engineering, mathematics, or the natural sciences.
WID researcher Shaoqin Sarah Gong is working to more safely deliver a variety of drugs to treat cancer, heart disease and even blindness.
The project Includes Hands-On Lab Work Testing Soil
Instructors from schools across the state are getting their hands dirty in the search for antibiotics by joining a new program.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Erik Wright, an alumnus of WID’s System’s Biology theme, is getting his feet wet as a new faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote about his career and vision in Science.
WID scientists are combining theory with experiment to try to understand how life could arise from lifelike chemical reactions under the right conditions.
Jo Handelsman began her tenure as Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery on February 1. Shortly before her start date, we sat down with her to talk about the future of WID and the course she intends to set.
Systems Biology researcher Sushmita Roy is leading an effort putting computational methods to work characterizing the gene regulatory networks responsible for cell differentiation.
Systems Biology Theme Leader, John Yin, Optimization Fellow, Rebecca Willett, LEL alumna, Carrie Roy, and new LEL Principal Investigator, Karen Schloss explain their innovative research. Sit back, relax and massage your brain with WID science.
The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery’s SILO and Qbio Seminars pull researchers from across campus for engaging interdisciplinary talks in mathematics and quantitative biology.
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.
