Author: Diana Lutz

The School of Engineering & Applied Science will honor six distinguished alumni at the annual Engineering Alumni Awards banquet at 7 p.m. Feb. 19. The school also will present the Dean’s Award to two individuals and one Young Alumni Award.

The School of Engineering & Applied Science will host a week of special events Feb. 16-20 to inspire current and future engineers.

National Science FoundationBuilding on plant virus research started more than 20 years ago, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and his colleague at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis have discovered a technology that reduces infection by the virus that causes Rice Tungro Disease, a serious limiting factor for rice production in Asia.

A crater on the moon has been named after the late Larry Haskin, Ph.D., who spent much of his career as a researcher in the WUSTL Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences.

Photo by David KilperNASA astronaut and WUSTL alum Robert Behnken makes a point to visit the WUSTL campus on his trip home to St. Louis last fall.

David Kilper/WUSTL PhotoWUSTL biomedical engineers Younan Xia (left) and Lihong Wang examine the photoacoustic tomography machine (PAT) in Wang’s Whitaker Building laboratory.Information obtained from a new application of photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is worth its weight in gold to breast cancer patients. For the first time, Lihong Wang, Ph.D., Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, with a joint appointment in Radiology, and Younan Xia, Ph.D., James M. McKelvey Professor in Biomedical Engineering, with a joint appointment in chemistry in Arts & Sciences, both at Washington University in St. Louis, have used gold nanocages to map sentinel lymph nodes (SLN) in a rat noninvasively using PAT.

It’s a little like finding out that Superman is actually Clark Kent. A team of biologists at Washington University in St. Louis has discovered that two vital cellular components, nuclear RNA Polymerases IV and V (Pol IV and V), found only in plants, are actually specialized forms of RNA Polymerase II, an essential enzyme of all eukaryotic organisms, including humans.

Joshua Maurer, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a four-year, $1,216,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health for research titled, “Unraveling Development: New Materials for Understanding Neuronal Wiring.” Maurer’s long term objective is to develop methodology that allows the study of a variety of neuronal wiring processes. He is starting by unscrambling a phenomenon known as midline crossing using zebrafish. During development, neurons from the right eye cross the midline of the brain to make a connection in the left hemisphere.

PikaardA team led by Craig Pikaard, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, has made a breakthrough in understanding the phenomenon of nucleolar dominance, the silencing of an entire parental set of ribosomal RNA genes in a hybrid plant or animal. Since the machinery involved in nucleolar dominance is some of the same machinery that can go haywire in diseases such as cancer, Pikaard and his collaborators’ research may have important implications for applied medical research. Click here for a podcast from Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News: Interview with Craig Pikaard.

Ellen Damschen & Forest ServiceA new paper on ecological corridors co-authored by Washington University biologists Ellen Damschen and John Orrock in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, was published online Dec. 1 as part of a special issue on movement ecology. This research reveals that by understanding how species move, you can predict if and how corridors work.