As muscles age, their cells lose the ability to regenerate and heal after injury. Cornell Engineering researchers have created the most comprehensive portrait to date of how that change, in mice, unfolds over time and across the complicated architecture of muscle tissue. “The fundamental question that drove the initial study was really a question that had perplexed the skeletal muscle biology community,” said Ben Cosgrove, associate professor in the Cornell Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering and the paper’s senior author. “Does the decline in regeneration seen in old muscles come from changes to the stem cells that drive the repair process themselves, or does it come from changes in the way that they are instructed by other cell...

The Weill Institute has awarded Postdoctoral researcher Si Chen the 2024 Sam and Nancy Fleming Research Fellowship. This prestigious three-year fellowship supports talented young researchers who are doing cutting-edge research in basic biomedical sciences and are planning careers in biological or medical research. “The Fleming Fellowships provide exceptional young scientists the support and freedom to pursue ambitious projects,” said Marcus Smolka, interim director of the Weill Institute and professor of molecular biology and genetics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “The 2024 recipient is a remarkable researcher. Her proposal to measure the interplay of mechanosensing and the mechanics of plant growth is highly innovative and is a great example for how science...

A new tool, called PIONEER, harnesses the power of AI and deep machine learning models to solve and predict how human proteins might interface and interact with other proteins. The tool can greatly accelerate fundamental research, clinical precision medicine and the development of therapies or the application of existing drugs to treat all types of disorders. “What we did here is solve structures for protein machineries that actually carry out cellular functions within cells,” said co-corresponding author Haiyuan Yu, Tisch University Professor in the Department of Computational Biology and a member of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. […] “Not only did we build this AI model, but we used it to solve all known protein interactions in human cells already,”...

Led by Dapeng Xiong, Yunguang Qiu, Junfei Zhao, Yadi Zhou, and Dongjin Lee, the Yu lab and collaborators have published an article in Nature Biotechnology that presents an ensemble deep learning framework, termed PIONEER (Protein–protein InteractiOn iNtErfacE pRediction), that predicts protein-binding partner-specific interfaces for all known protein interactions in humans, and seven other common model organisms to generate comprehensive structurally informed protein...

Bill Loftus, our Director of Operations, has been awarded a President’s Award for Employee Excellence, Thoughtful Leader Award. Read more about the President’s Awards...

Inle Bush (undergraduate student in the Han Lab) has been awarded a CAS Undergraduate Research Program grant, supporting the project: “Identification of Golgi Outpost Formation and Maturation Pathways in Drosophila melanogaster Neurons.” Congrats,...

Xander Lacrampe, a BCMB Graduate student in the Hu lab, has been awarded a Graduate School Dean’s Scholars Provost Diversity Fellowship. Congrats, Xander! Click here for more information about this...

A publication by Rebecca Z. Zawistowski (graduate student in the Crane Lab) in The Journal of Molecular Biology discusses how high pressure affects the structure of a protein called cytochrome c peroxidase (CcP). It shows that while the outer parts of the protein shrink and shift slightly under pressure, the core remains stable, protecting its key functions from...

Lilijana Oliver is a doctoral student in plant biology from Rush, New York. She earned her B.S. at Yale University and now studies polyploidy in plant development under the guidance of Adrienne Roeder at Cornell. What is your area of research and why is it important? My research focuses on the role of polyploidy in plant development using the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana. Polyploidy occurs when a whole genome duplication event results in more than two copies of a genome per somatic cell. This may occur across every cell of an entire organism or only in specific cells. Polyploidy is widespread amongst plants, and has been linked to everything from their evolution, to stress response, to cell and organ size, and more. I aim to understand the mechanisms by which polyploidy alters...

Bella and Adrienne discuss their investigation into robustness in the developing Arabidopsis...

Led by graduate student Xinchen Chen, members of the Han Lab (in collaboration with researchers at the USC) have published an article in PLOS Genetics about a new CRISPR toolkit to knock out specific genes in different types of cells in fruit fly tissues, particularly focusing on the neuromuscular junction (NMJ). Using this method, researchers from the Han lab identified important genes that help maintain the NMJ structure and regulate communication between nerve and muscle...

Organ development is a robust process, resulting in a reproducible organ size and shape across organisms. Altering the rates of cell division has been shown to not affect this robustness, as cells can compensate by changing their size and shape. However, the mechanisms that control this remain unclear. Here, Isabella Burda, Adrienne Roeder and colleagues investigate this robustness in the developing Arabidopsis thaliana sepal, the leaf-like organ that encloses the flower bud, by looking at a combination of mutants that affect cell division and cell growth rate heterogeneity. Using live imaging and cell growth tracking, the authors find that, in wild-type plants and plants with an increased or decreased number of cell divisions, the organ-scale growth pattern remains unaltered....

Dr. Adrienne Roeder was featured in the latest episode of InSDB’s “Behind The Bench” interview series, where she discusses her research into the intersection of patterning and morphogenesis in Arabidopsis development, and the value of bridging the gaps between science disciplines to foster collaborative interdisciplinary...

Dr. Megan Keller, graduate of the Doerr Lab, was awarded the CHIMID Fellowship, which offers postdoctoral scholars financial and professional development support to study host-microbe interactions. The Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease (CIHMID) is composed of researchers representing multiple departments and colleges at Cornell University, united in the common pursuit of understanding host-microbe biology. This fellowship, which is supported by a National Institutes of Health training grant, encourages collaborations across multiple Cornell labs and fosters intellectual independence in research that spans various disciplines. Dr. Keller’s research will focus on repurposing antibiotics into new combinational therapy for treating clinical infections. By...

The 2024 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize will be awarded to Scott Emr and Wesley Sundquist for discovering the ESCRT pathway and revealing how it works. Defects in ESCRT function can lead to uncontrolled cell growth and tumor formation, contributing to cancer, neurodegeneration, and Parkinson’s disease. In addition, many viruses, including HIV, hijack ESCRT machinery to exit an infected host...

In a recent paper from the Roeder lab published in Developmental Cell, Shuyao Kong and Mingyuan Zhu investigate how a mutation in the protein coding gene DRMY1 in Arabidopsis plants affects the consistent formation of sepals, which protect the flower bud. The mutation reduces protein production, leading to a disruption in signals that normally control sepal development, causing variability in their number and...

A new paper from the Baskin lab (in collaboration with Smolka Lab and scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine) in Nature Cell Biology reports a system for mitosis-specific protein recruitment to the plasma membrane. The work was led by graduate student Xiaofu...

This recent article from the Baskin Lab introduces a method for direct visualization of phospholipid transport mechanisms within the cell, specifically between the plasma membrane and the endoplasmic reticulum. Special fluorescent markers allowed them to study the roles of lipid transfer proteins in the interorganelle distribution of...

Roeder Lab alum Shuyao Kong has published an article in Nature Communications that investigates the role of the protein CUC1 in the relationship between developmental speed and robustness in Arabidopsis flower...

Ryan Vignogna, Postdoctoral Associate in the Fromme Lab, has been awarded the competitive NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship (F32). This fellowship, administered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), supports promising researchers in pursuing postdoctoral training in biomedical, behavioral, or clinical research. As an evolutionary cell biologist, Dr. Vignogna is broadly interested in understanding how evolution shapes biological processes and how biological processes affect evolutionary outcomes. Specifically, he is interested in studying how cells respond to perturbations in conserved biological processes such as protein modifications, mitochondrial...