How does a tomato plant decide if it’s warm enough to bear fruit?  What causes basil to bolt and rush to produce flowers when the weather gets hot? Do we really understand how plants sense temperature? For decades, researchers searched for a single “thermosensor”—a biological thermometer buried deep in the plant’s molecular machinery. But a new theory is flipping that idea on its head.  A growing number of studies suggest that plants don’t have one master sensor, according to Avilash Singh Yadav, postdoctoral associate with Adrienne Roeder, professor at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, and the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences School of Integrative Plant Science, Plant Biology Section. “What we realize is that temperature sensing in...

Marcus Smolka, professor of molecular biology and genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), has been named an associate vice provost in Research & Innovation. His two-year appointment began May 1. Smolka succeeds Hector Aguilar-Carreño, professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Veterinary Medicine, who served in the role from July 2024 through April...

Flowers grow stems, leaves and petals in a perfect pattern again and again.  Even in this precise, patterned formation in plants, gene activity inside individual cells is far more chaotic than it appears from the outside.This finding has important implications for plant engineering, where scientists design artificial gene switches to control growth or behavior. Understanding how plants manage genetic “noise” could also inform research in other fields, from synthetic biology, where predictability is crucial, to research on cancer, where random gene activity can drive tumor...

“There was a time my roommate asked, ‘Why are you spending so much time in the lab?’ And that really hit me,” said Yanru Liu, a graduate researcher at Cornell’s Weill Institute for Cell & Molecular Biology. “I realized I need to explain my work to more people. It’s not just scientists doing their own thing—what we’re doing matters to everyone.” Graduate students, like Liu, play a central role in advancing research—designing experiments, analyzing data, and assisting or even leading discoveries at the cutting edge of their fields. At the same time, they serve as teaching assistants, mentors, and instructors, helping to educate and support undergraduate students across disciplines. At Cornell, Liu has enjoyed wearing these many...

As part of EYH, CROPPS trainee and doctoral student in plant biology Michelle Heeney hosted a workshop on biologically inspired engineering using plants with the lab of Adrienne Roeder, professor at the the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology and the Section of Plant Biology in the School of Integrative Plant Science. The workshop also tackled a common but often overlooked issue in science education: plant blindness—the tendency to overlook plants in our environment and underestimate their importance. “When we teach students to see the patterns in plants and draw on them for inspiration, we’re not just curing plant blindness—we’re inviting them to open a lifelong dialogue with the natural world surrounding them,” Heeney said. CROPPS trainees at EYH included...

Dr. Adrienne Roeder joins worldwide colleagues in this commentary in The Plant Cell. Over the past 40 years, Arabidopsis has emerged as the most powerful and versatile plant model to uncover core biological principles and served as a prototyping system to test advanced molecular and genetic concepts. The authors argue that the emerging challenges of accelerating climate instability and a rapidly growing global population call for renewed and robust investments in fundamental plant biology research. Leveraging the power of Arabidopsis research, resources, datasets, and global, collaborative community is more important than ever. This commentary lays out a vigorous defense of foundational, i.e., “basic”, plant science research; describes that often, Arabidopsis is preferable to...

A team of researchers at Cornell University have made a discovery in fruit flies that could change the way we understand brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s in humans.   The scientists found that Eato—a fruit-fly protein whose counterparts in mammals were already known for helping brain cells get rid of harmful fats—actually has a much bigger job. It not only protects neurons (brain cells), from being destroyed, but also increases the efficiency by which other cells, called phagocytes, clean up damaged neurons. The researchers used Drosophila fruit flies, which are commonly used in experiments because they have many of the same basic biological processes as...

Congratulations, Byron! Byron Rusnak is a graduate student with Adrienne Roeder. Byron uses imaging and genetic techniques to measure the cellular signaling and growth patterns that lead to the precise and coordinated development of plant sepals. The Barbara McClintock Graduate Student Award is made possible by an endowment from Dr. Robert Rabson to honor outstanding senior graduate students studying in the Plant Sciences (Plant Biology, Plant Pathology & Plant-Microbe Biology, Plant Breeding, Horticulture or Soil & Crop Sciences) at Cornell. It is awarded annually and students are selected based on their academic, research, teaching, and outreach achievements as well as on their potential to continue an outstanding career in the Plant...

Karisa Bockley, a BME undergraduate student in the Lammerding Lab, was recognized by the Cornell Engineering Alumni Association with their 2025 Undergraduate Research Award. This award includes $1,000 towards further research. In addition, Karisa just published a co-first author publication (‘micro-publication’) with her mentor: Filamin A interacting protein 1-like (FILIP1L) has mitochondrial localization. Read the full article here: DOI 10.17912/micropub.biology.001572 Congratulations,...

As an undergraduate researcher in the Dörr Lab, Zoe Tarun ’25 investigates how bacteria construct and maintain a healthy cell envelope, and how they resist being killed by antibiotics. Coming to Cornell from a rural background, Zoe had limited experience in lab research but was eager to get involved. After meeting Professor Tobias Dörr in his microbiology class, she was invited to join his lab. That opportunity marked a turning point and led to one of the most meaningful mentorships of her college...

Researchers have identified a new way to fight infections like Lyme disease and syphilis by disrupting bacterial motility, preventing their spread through the body. The findings could have wide-ranging impacts on the treatment of infections in the future as concern about antibiotic-resistant strains grows. This research was conducted by members of the Weill Institute’s Crane lab as well as collaborators at West Virginia University and Virginia Commonwealth University, and was published in the journal ACS Chemical...

A study from Yu Lab researchers in the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at Cornell University could enable a quantum leap forward in identifying and deciphering cancer-driving genetic mutations, the first step in developing effective...

  Beth Ryan, a Chemistry and Chemical Biology graduate student in the Weill Institute’s Baskin Lab, has been chosen as a Young Scientist invited to attend the 74th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting on Chemistry, this June 2025. Nobel Laureates in Chemistry and 600 highly talented Young Scientists from around the world will come together in Lindau, Germany, for a unique week of scientific exchange, inspiration, and networking, during lectures, panel discussions, and small-size discussion sessions. Beth shared her enthusiasm and gratitude on earning this prestigious recognition: “I am incredibly excited to be selected to attend this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Chemistry. It is such a unique opportunity,” she said. “There is really no other situation...

ACS Chemical Biology and the ACS Division of Biological Chemistry have announced Dr. Jeremy Baskin of Cornell University as the recipient of the 2024 ACS Chemical Biology Young Investigator Award. This award honors the contributions of an early-career individual doing outstanding work in chemical biology. Dr. Baskin will present the ACS Chemical Biology Young Investigator Lecture during ACS Spring 2025 on Wednesday, March 26 from 2:00 PM – 4:50 PM in the San Diego Convention Center. Jeremy M. Baskin is Associate Professor, Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences, and Director of the Chemistry–Biology Interface Program at Cornell University, with appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell and...

Think you can explain your research with just one slide and three minutes? That was the challenge of the Three Minute Thesis Online Competition from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences — and this year, trainee Michelle Heeney took first place with her presentation: “Botanical gossip: Deciphering mobile signaling with interspecies plant...

An interdisciplinary team of Cornell researchers, including Weill Institute faculty member Adrienne Roeder, is developing HelioSkin, an aesthetically appealing solar-collection fabric that is inspired by the biological mechanisms that enable plants to bend toward the...

Brian Crane, the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been appointed director of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, an interdisciplinary hub for life sciences research at Cornell. Crane brings to the institute decades of experience studying the structure, function and mechanism of the protein systems that underlie signal transduction. Crane’s appointment began on January 1, 2025. Scott Emr, the Samuel C. and Nancy M. Fleming Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, stepped down in July 2022 after serving as the institute’s director since its founding in 2008. Marcus Smolka, professor of molecular biology and genetics, served as the...

A major goal of cancer biology is to understand the mechanisms driven by somatically acquired mutations. Two distinct methodologies—one analyzing mutation clustering within protein sequences and 3D structures, the other leveraging protein-protein interaction network topology—offer complementary strengths. We present NetFlow3D, a unified, end-to-end 3D structurally-informed protein interaction network propagation framework that maps the multiscale mechanistic effects of mutations. Built upon the Human Protein Structurome, which incorporates the 3D structures of every protein and the binding interfaces of all known protein interactions, NetFlow3D integrates atomic, residue, protein and network-level information: It clusters mutations on 3D protein structures to identify driver mutations...

The stability of the genome relies on phosphatidyl inositol 3-kinase-related kinases (PIKKs) that sense DNA damage and trigger elaborate downstream signaling responses. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the Tel1 kinase (ortholog of human ATM) is activated at DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) and short telomeres. Despite the well-established roles of Tel1 in the control of telomere maintenance, suppression of chromosomal rearrangements, activation of cell cycle checkpoints, and repair of DSBs, the substrates through which Tel1 controls these processes remain incompletely understood. Here we performed an in-depth phosphoproteomic screen for Tel1-dependent phosphorylation events. To achieve maximal coverage of the phosphoproteome, we developed a scaled-up approach that accommodates large amounts...

Rab GTPases act as molecular switches to regulate organelle homeostasis and membrane trafficking. Rab6 plays a central role in regulating cargo flux through the Golgi and is activated via nucleotide exchange by the Ric1-Rgp1 protein complex. Ric1-Rgp1 is conserved throughout eukaryotes but the structural and mechanistic basis for its function has not been established. Here we report the cryoEM structure of a Ric1-Rgp1‐Rab6 complex representing a key intermediate of the nucleotide exchange reaction. Ric1-Rgp1 interacts with the nucleotide-binding domain of Rab6 using an uncharacterized helical domain, which we establish as a RabGEF domain by identifying residues required for Rab6 activation. Unexpectedly, the complex uses an arrestin fold to interact with the Rab6 hypervariable domain,...