By Stephan Benzkofer Fifty years ago, scientists at the University of Chicago sought to break through traditional academic barriers to revolutionize the field of biology. They created the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, which has been a driving force behind impactful scientific inquiry at the University of Chicago ever since. To this day, its deeply interconnected graduate
By Steven Withrow Human beings now have the technology to rewrite our genetic codes and the codes of every organism on Earth. What is more, this technology has been around for billions of years—bacteria naturally evolved it as a mechanism to fight off viral invaders—only to be discovered in the early 2000s by researchers working
By Jane Marks
Grass Fellow Rachel Parkinson looks at the link between crop insecticides and the decline in bee populations.
Science Friday wrapped up its “eight-day squid-and-kin appreciation extravaganza,” Cephalopod Week, by interviewing MBL Hibbitt Fellow Carrie Albertin, who gives Ira Flatow “a tour of the complex genomes of octopuses, and how understanding cephalopod genetics could lead to greater insights into human health.” … Read more and hear broadcast … Source: Closing Out The Cephalo-Party
The Microbiome Center, a joint initiative of the MBL, the University of Chicago, and Argonne National Laboratory, has announced the successful applicants for its inaugural Pilot Projects Funding Call. The focus of these ~$20K grants is to provide seed monies for microbial research projects that will help investigators generate the data needed for larger funding
The ink-stained lab coats on these MBL Physiology course students tell a story! Last week, using local squid provisioned by the MBL collecting boat, the students recreated the exciting discovery of kinesin in squid neurons in the early 1980s at MBL. Kinesins are a large and important family of motor proteins that perform critical biological
By Mićo Tatalović Move over mice and fruit flies, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is busy developing the next great model organism for science. Just past a “squid sign-out” sheet, on the ground floor of a stately brick building at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, a handful of
By Heather Goldstone and Elsa Partan Imagine losing an arm or leg and thinking “No problem! It will grow back.” Now, imagine finding a bump on your big toe one day, only to have it grow into a complete clone of you that buds off and walks away. Laughable, right? But that’s exactly what earthworms
This fall on the MBL campus, the week-long QBio Bootcamp for University of Chicago graduate students will be held for the fifth time. The intensive training session in quantitative biology—combined with a responsible research course taught later in the academic year—prepares students in the Biological Sciences Division with the programming, statistics, and documentation practices they
<![endif][if lt IE 9]>< ![endif] Congratulations to the 2019 Grass Fellowship recipients! These early-career scientists will spend the upcoming summer at the MBL pursuing a self-designed, independent research project. The Grass Fellows function as an intellectual and social group within the MBL scientific community while sharing research space in the storied Grass Lab. This years’