News

More than 100 scientists—faculty, postdocs and graduate students—recently gathered at MSU to attend the 2019 Molecular Biophysics Symposium, which highlighted the opening of MSU’s $5 million Cryo-EM Facility. Cryogenic electron microscopy—typically abbreviated as cryo-EM—is an imaging technology that allows scientists to study cells, viruses and protein structures at the atomic level and capture them in action.

Michigan State University experimental evolutionary biologist, Richard Lenski, has been awarded the 2020 D.C. White Award by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM)—the world’s oldest and largest life science organization—in recognition and honor of his distinguished accomplishments, not only in interdisciplinary research but in mentoring.

A new study, published in Science, uses high-resolution satellite data to funnel the details of individual local analyses into one, global map. Using advanced technology and software, the researchers created interactive maps that showcase the details of local analyses on a global stage. Informed by this planet-wide analysis, the paper emphasizes nature’s declining ability to protect people from water pollution, coastal storms and under-pollinated crops.

Depression affects women nearly twice as much as men, but unraveling the brain’s blueprint that regulates this behavior, let alone identifying specific molecular differences between sexes, has proven difficult.

Michigan State University researchers, however, have found and flipped a switch in the brain, revealing a single circuit in mice that activates during stress and is controlled by testosterone. The results, published in Biological Psychiatry, focus on the activity between neurons in the ventral hippocampus, which become active under stress and emotion, and their activation of nucleus accumbens neurons, critical players in reward and motivation.

MSU chemist Liangliang Sun has received a 5-year, $670,000 NSF Early CAREER Award to develop a novel mass spectrometry-based analytical method to identify and to quantify protein molecules that cannot currently be detected in biological samples.

Four outstanding College of Natural Science students were awarded full scholarships to MSU this fall. Joseph Chung, Alison Cramer and Alder Fulton were chosen as Alumni Distinguished Scholars, and Maya Joyce was selected as a University Distinguished Scholar.

MSU integrative biologist Jason Gallant is using a three-year, $680,000 National Science Foundation grant to continue work on an discovery that variations in the electric pulses of electric fish may be due to unusual changes in a common protein called a potassium channel.

Habitat fragmentation is a major threat to biodiversity. A new study published in Science demonstrates a hopeful new strategy in efforts to conserve plant and animal species confronting fragmented and shrinking habitats globally.