Science & Technology

Animals will often put their lives on the line for reproduction, even if it comes at the cost of being the wrong temperature. New research from biologist Michael Moore in Arts & Sciences could help reveal the pathways that organisms might take as they adapt to a warming world.

Insect-eating plants have fascinated biologists for more than a century, but how plants evolved the ability to capture and consume live prey has largely remained a mystery. Biologist Ivan Radin in Arts & Sciences and collaborators investigated the molecular basis of plant carnivory in sundews and found evidence that it evolved from mechanisms plants use to defend themselves.

A research group led by Rohit Pappu in the McKelvey School of Engineering and Anthony Hyman at the Max Planck Institute have discovered a new, relevant level of structure in cells.

Camelina, an oilseed plant grown in modern-day Ukraine, may have been a more important and widespread crop than previously thought, according to collaborators from anthropology and biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Their findings could inform breeding programs to improve this crop for biofuels applications.

A team that received early support from the Living Earth Collaborative was awarded a $633,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to evaluate pollination in orchards across the city of St. Louis. They will examine how factors such as human population density, socioeconomic status, soil type and surrounding vegetation impact insect numbers and fruit yield.

Living Earth Collaborative postdoctoral fellow Matthew Austin published new research finding that climate change is affecting how violets reproduce.

Collaborative research from the labs of Daniel Giammar and Jeffrey Catalano finds a lack of available metals may be responsible for more nitrous oxide than previously thought.

Joan Strassmann and David Queller, both in Arts & Sciences, received a $141,578 supplemental award from the National Science Foundation for research on amoeba-bacteria cooperation.

Arts & Sciences biologists from the lab of Jonathan Myers determined that tree beta diversity — a measure of site-to-site variation in the composition of species present within a given area — matters more for the ecosystem than other components of biodiversity at larger scales.

A new modeling framework proposed by physicist Mikhail Tikhonov in Arts & Sciences demonstrates how a more complex microbial ecosystem can be more coarse-grainable, making it potentially easier for scientists to understand, than one with only a few microbes interacting.