Author: Talia Ogliore

Rachel Penczykowski, an assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, won a prestigious National Science Foundation grant for early-career faculty who excel at mentorship and research. The award will fund a project investigating infestations of a common plant pathogen in the St. Louis area.

Research from the lab of Hong Chen, at the McKelvey School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, and collaborators found that using focused-ultrasound-mediated liquid biopsy in a mouse model released more tau proteins and another biomarker into the blood than without the intervention. This noninvasive method could facilitate diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders.

A study in iScience led by biologist Yehuda Ben-Shahar in Arts & Sciences identifies a link between the genetic instructions for the perception and production of pheromones.

Major advances in battery technologies will bring us a big step closer this year to large-scale renewable energy goals, international energy independence and a big reduction in greenhouse gases, according to Arts & Sciences’ Michael Wysession.

A team of researchers led by Young-Shin Jun at the McKelvey School of Engineering analyzed how light breaks down polystyrene, the plastic from which packing peanuts and disposable utensils are made. They found that small plastic particles interact with neighboring substances more easily than previously thought, including with things like heavy metals and organic contaminants.

Models based on an average cell are useful, but they may not accurately describe how individual cells really work. Molecular biologists use actual single-cell data to update the framework for understanding the relationship between cell growth, DNA replication and division in a bacterial system.

Far from orderly “brick-by-brick” assembly, the internal structures of cells are grown in stochastic bursts, according to physicist Shankar Mukherji in Arts & Sciences, author of a Jan. 6 study in Physical Review Letters.

Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without atmospheric oxygen. The study from the laboratory of Jeffrey Catalano in Arts & Sciences was published Dec. 22 in Nature Geoscience.

A team of scientists including physicist Johanna Nagy at Washington University in St. Louis successfully launched a balloon-borne experiment studying the early universe on Dec. 21. The instrument, called SPIDER, was carried aloft by a scientific balloon from its launch pad in Antarctica.

Fangqiong Ling at the McKelvey School of Engineering and Likai Chen in Arts & Sciences developed a machine learning model that uses the assortment of microbes found in wastewater to tease out how many individual people they represent. Their study was published in PLOS Computational Biology.