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April 5, 2021
MSU’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, located at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, was founded in 1988 to employ and understand the ecology of Midwest cropping systems and agricultural landscapes. When KBS passed the 30-year mark in 2018, three former KBS researchers, Sarah Cusser, Jackson Helms and Christie Bahlai, decided the 30th anniversary was not only a significant milestone, but a good time to ask questions about LTER’s database. Thanks to their efforts, which were recently published in Ecology Letters, they now know that ecological investigations of at least nine years are needed to achieve significant, consistent results related to accelerated climate and land use change. 
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March 29, 2021
Uncovering the genetics behind a six-decade long cholera pandemic is being funded with a $2.8 million National Institutes of Health grant awarded to MSU microbiologist Chris Waters. The research project will investigate 36 genes key to the persistence of cholera to increase understanding of how bacterial pandemics surface as well as boost development of new viral therapies to treat bacterial infections.
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March 27, 2021
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.
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March 26, 2021
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.
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March 17, 2021
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.
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March 14, 2021
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. 
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March 10, 2021
On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle was hurtling through space at nearly the speed of light and happened to smash into an electron deep inside the South Pole’s glacial ice. The collision created a new particle, known as the W– boson. This enabled IceCube to make the first ever detection of a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted 60 years ago by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow. The international IceCube Collaboration, including MSU scientists Claudio Kopper and Nathan Whitehorn, published this result online on March 11 in the journal Nature.
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March 9, 2021
A warming climate may not increase water demand for Midwest crops that may instead be adapted through soil management to changing air temperatures and moisture, said MSU scientists helping farmers manage the challenge. The research team, led by ecosystems scientist Bruno Basso, found that the Midwest is in a unique location that typically receives ample rainfall and has deep soil, ideal for farming. Their results were published March 5 in the journal Nature Communications. 
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February 25, 2021
The National Science Foundation has awarded Michigan State University researcher Polly Hsu a $1.2 million grant to probe plant genetics at a new level to better understand how crops cope with drought. This work could help farmers and scientists better protect plants as water scarcity is projected to affect more and more people over the next century.
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February 12, 2021
During his ground-breaking E. coli Long-Term Evolution Project,  MSU experimental evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski has witnessed the beginning and end of more than one lifetime—73,000 bacterial lifetimes and counting, to be exact. Now, the Society for the Study of Evolution is honoring Lenski’s extraordinary life to date with the prestigious 2021 SSE Evolution Lifetime Achievement Award.
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February 8, 2021
Climate change is bleaching and killing corals, but researchers from MSU and the University of Hawaii are investigating how some can stand up to a warming world. According to research published Feb. 8 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, the scientists discovered biochemical clues following an extreme high temperature event in Hawaii's Kenneohe Bay that could help reefs better weather warming waters in the future.
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February 5, 2021
According to a paper recently published in BioScience by MSU entomologist Anthony Cognato and master's student Erica Fischer, collaboration between amateur butterfly collectors and entomology researchers has never been so critical to ensuring that critically important large-scale contemporary and future ecological, conservation, and evolutionary hypotheses concerning insects can be tested.
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February 1, 2021
MSU plant biologist David Lowry is part of a study that examines the use of switchgrass in fighting climate change to improve crop growth. As reported in a recent issue of Nature, the team has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome, and is exploring improvements to switchgrass through more targeted genome editing and customization of the crop for additional end products. 
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January 29, 2021
A new four-year, $13 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science is helping the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at MSU harvest unused isotopes for a variety of research fields, including medicine, materials science and environmental studies.
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January 26, 2021
Researchers in MSU's College of Natural Science have completed the largest census of freshwater insects ever undertaken in the United States, the first of its kind. The database, which includes 2.05 million occurrence records for 932 genera of major freshwater insect orders at more than 51,000 streams and rivers, was presented in a paper recently published in the journal Global Ecology & Biogeography.
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January 15, 2021
Contaminant runoff from Michigan septic systems, agriculture and industry has caused enough environmental damage in the Saginaw Bay watershed for it to be designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an area of concern for the past 30 years. To address this issue, MSU geomicrobiologist Matt Schrenk is leading  a 2-year Michigan Sea Grant project that will combine high resolution microbiology and geochemical studies to pinpoint the toxic leaks—a big step toward successful remediation efforts by state and local agencies.
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January 8, 2021
Michigan State University researchers, lead by microbiologist Gemma Reguera, show how microbes stand up to a toxic metal, opening the door for applications in recycling and remediation. Their results were recently published in the journal, Frontiers in Microbiology.
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December 22, 2020
Every fungus, plant and animal on earth is dependent on their cells’ endoplasmic reticulum—a three-dimensional organelle of protein producing and folding tubules—to grow and survive. Federica Brandizzi, MSU Foundation Professor in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab, is using powerful genomics tools and a $1.95 million NIH grant to understand how it works with the aim of treating diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer more effectively.

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