Newsroom Stories

How strong are the links in food webs? An experiment at Washington University in St. Louis demonstrates that they’re strong enough for a disturbance  to propagate across four trophic levels and two ecosystems. The experiment demonstrates that invasive species such as purple loosestrife could have broad effects on surrounding plant and animal communities, many of them cryptic.

WHAT: In an environmentally friendly and community initiative, Washington University in St. Louis and Teamsters Joint Council 13 will load about 1 million pounds of large rolls of artificial turf from WUSTL’s Francis Field into trucks to be distributed and reused throughout the region in playgrounds, parks and more, instead of ending up in a […]

A new assay that uses mitochondrial DNA that mutates faster than nuclear DNA has allowed scientists at Washington University in St. Louis to identify one of the major animal reservoirs for the ehlichioses, STARI and other tick-borne diseases in the southeastern United States. The animal turned out to be the eastern gray squirrel.

A protein required to regrow injured peripheral nerves has been identified by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The finding, in mice, has implications for improving recovery after nerve injury in the extremities. It also opens new avenues of investigation toward triggering nerve regeneration in the central nervous system, notorious for its inability to heal.

Researchers studying the genetic roots of the most common malignant childhood brain tumor have discovered missteps in three of the four subtypes of the cancer involving genes that are already being targeted for drug development.

Gov. Jay Nixon appointed Mark W. Smith, JD, assistant vice chancellor and director of the Career Center at Washington University of St. Louis, to serve on the Midwestern Higher Education Commission (MHEC). The commission advances higher education through interstate cooperation and resource sharing.

David H. Gutmann, MD, PhD, a neurofibromatosis expert at the Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has received the 2012 Friedrich von Recklinghausen Award.

Randall Bateman, MD, has been named the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor in Neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

A cross-Atlantic collaboration between scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, both in Grenoble, France, has revealed the workings of a switch that activates plant hormones, tags them for storage or marks them for destruction.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found new clues to why some urinary tract infections recur persistently after multiple rounds of treatment. Their research, conducted in mice, suggests that the bacteria that cause urinary tract infections take advantage of a cellular waste disposal system that normally helps fight invaders.