News

Under the direction of MSU physiologist Erica Wehrwein, the Physiology Majors Interest Group (P-MIG) published 14 manuscripts in a special collection of papers featured in Advances in Physiology Education. The papers in this first-of-its-kind special collection represent the culmination of recent P-MIG efforts and capture the breadth of the group’s work, including its history and purpose.

Life is messy, even at microscopic and molecular level, but MSU researchers, led by Michael Feig and Lisa Lapidus, have shown that some straightforward science can still account for important biological behavior. The team showed that relatively simple characteristics help RNA and proteins organize themselves. Researchers believe that when these biomolecules congregate, or condense, it can help speed up or enhance a range of cellular functions. Their results were recently published in the journal eLife.

Over the past year, racism and hate crimes directed toward the Asian Pacific Islander Desi American/Asian (APIDA/A) community have been ever growing. The MSU College of Natural Science condemns all anti-Asian sentiments and actions and mourns the victims of the recent attacks in Atlanta. We fully support President Stanley’s statement and stand in solidarity with the MSU APIDA/A community.

In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, scientists in Susannah Dorfman’s Experimental Mineralogy Lab at Michigan State University redefined the conditions under which carbonates can exist in the earth’s lower mantle, adding to our understanding of the deep carbon cycle and the earth’s evolution.

MSU microbiologist Sean Crosson and colleague Aretha Fiebig brought sophisticated genomics tools from the lab to the to the field in a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Using unique, barcoded bacteria, they gained new insight into Brucellosis, a deadly disease capable of infecting humans that has been circulating among cows in the United States for a hundred years.

The College of Natural Science is the recipient of a $2,500 Michigan State University Federal Credit Union (MSUFCU) Dean’s Choice grant to support its NatSci Undergraduate Emergency Assistance Fund. The MSUFCU Dean's Choice program recognizes academic excellence and provides MSU deans with funds to allocate toward competitive academic programs in their colleges.

Plants were evolving for hundreds of millions of years before humans started cultivating them for food. So when the first farmers showed up some 12,000 years ago, plants had already picked up some inefficiencies — that is, adaptations that helped the plants survive but also limited their productivity as crops. Today, some of those inefficiencies appear to be getting worse as the planet warms. MSU's Berkley Walker and Eastern Michigan University's Aaron Liepman are leading an NSF grant project to better understand one of those inefficiencies with the hopes of turning the tide. 

Six Michigan State University College of Natural Science (NatSci) faculty members and graduate students have received 2020-2021 All-University Awards in recognition of their outstanding contributions to education and research. The NatSci recipients are: Teena Gerhardt, Darren Incorvaia, Erica Wehrwein, Christopher Werneke, Willie Wong and Zhiyong Xi.