Molecular Puzzles in 3D: Understanding a Mechanism for Methylation

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.

Uncovering a Connection Between Regulators and Genes During Early Neurodevelopment

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 Hubs Launch at Illuminating Connections Event

WID’s new hubs—Data Science, Multi-Omics, and Illuminating Discovery—represent a new path forward for collaborative research projects and fields.

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.

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.

Understanding the Immune System with Machine Learning

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.