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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: At a recent training event, teachers from Milwaukee Public Schools were joined by a teacher from New York Public Schools, a middle school teacher from Oak Creek, and even a researcher planning to bring the program back to his home university in India.
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.
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.
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.
Sam Rikkers was born and raised in south central Wisconsin but has managed to make his mark in far-flung places. A graduate of Columbia University with a Master of International Affairs, he has served the Peace Corps in Zambia, earned a Law Degree from the University of Wisconsin and served …
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.
