Note: as we approach our first anniversary on Substack and the quiet time before the start of the fall semester, we will be taking a brief hiatus from posting. We will be back in September with new ideas and fresh content!

Drought and digging

The focus of today’s post is a paired piece called “Riza and Todana,” which appeared in the 2025 Art of Science show. The research behind it is led by Sam Walker, a graduate student in the laboratory of plant biology professor Andrew Leakey. In alignment with the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, which Leakey directs, the laboratory focuses on understanding the inner workings of plants with the goal of developing more resilient food and biofuel crops. Walker is specifically interested in two fundamentals of plant growth: rain and roots.

Walker is studying how the root structure of sorghum plants respond to water levels in the soil. When water is scarce, as in a drought, plants can’t walk away in search of what they need. Their best option for survival may be to adjust their structure as they grow. Some plants respond to drought by growing roots that are “steep, cheap, and deep”—ones that dive sharply downward into the soil, stay thin and sparse to limit energy expenditure, and reach far enough to find water hiding far below.

Sorghum is no stranger to drought conditions. A hardy grain that originated in Sudan, its resilience to a wide range of temperatures and soil conditions make it a key food crop and, more recently, a promising potential source of biofuel. Walker’s research is examining in detail how the roots of this tenacious plant enable it to handle the extremes of soil moisture levels.

To do so, he and his labmates grow sorghum in the field under rainout shelters, specially designed tent-like structures that control the amount of water reaching the plants beneath while keeping other aspects of outdoor growth relatively unchanged. They then harvest the plants with the roots intact, remove the soil, and dry the resulting root ball. The samples they are left with are twisted skeletons of the structures that were once the plants’ life-giving water lines.

Walker examines the dried root balls using a CT scanner. Like those used in medicine, this machine uses x-rays to collect a series of images of the roots’ internal structures that can be assembled into a three-dimensional understanding of their shape. The researchers can measure the lengths and the internal diameters of the roots and compare the results across genetic varieties of sorghum and levels of drought experienced by different plants. By discovering what specific root growth traits allow plants to thrive, they hope to develop more crop strains able to tolerate a wide variety of weather conditions.

Water colors

As she began work on the piece, artist Julia Pollack observed Walker as he conducted CT scans of root samples. Each 3D image is a dense stack of layered visual data, and once assembled by a software program, it can be sliced along any axis. She wanted to represent the richness of this high density of information, envisioning prints scaled up so that a viewer had the sense of being shrunk down to explore the roots by moving around and through them.

While the roots themselves are dried and have a skeletal appearance, the science behind the images relates to water access. Roots, hidden in the soil, feed the green world of plants that we see and love. Pollack wanted to use watercolor paint to emphasize this; she created a series of color field watercolor layers to pull into the digital root image layers. The organic colors and softer lines created by the paint, when brought into the digital drawing space, created depth and complexity.

As Pollack continued to work with the images, she realized that the watercolors might help people actually understand the differences between the roots grown in varying conditions. Walker had provided both images of roots under drought conditions and roots with excess water. She began experimenting with colors and shades, searching for a level of contrast that would give viewers a sense of whether a plant was under stress or not. This became a process of trial and error; she printed multiple versions and invited others to view them in order to see the lines and colors and their implications with a fresh perspective.

The final work became two four foot by eight foot banners that represent the grand scale and detail of the original CT images. Paired by their root crown and cross section, each piece represents an experimental condition: one, flourishing in an overabundance of water and lush with color; the other, drained of vibrancy and anchored in drought by its search for water.

Parting thoughts

The title of this piece was inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, which takes place largely in a post-apocalyptic world that is often harsh, hot, and dry. Motifs of resilience and persistence echo the scientific ideas and artistic elements of this piece. In the terminology of the series, a “’riza” (oriza) is a plate for rice that might represent abundance, but is also used by women as a defensive weapon; a “todana” is a “death-bag,” an aura that signifies a looming fate. If you need a little bit of extra reading material in your life while this newsletter or other sources of content go on a brief hiatus during August’s dry time, the Dark Tower series (a favorite of several members of our group!) offers more than enough.

Why is cancer so hard to find early?

When the immune system is faced with external invaders—like viruses, bacteria, or parasites—it kicks into action to fight the infection after identifying the foreign material. Cancer, instead, occurs when the body’s own cells start growing uncontrollably, due to an accumulation of errors that break down their internal regulators of growth. Healthy tissue can tell when it has grown to fill its space within the body and accomplish its function; cells will be replaced as older ones die, but do not expand beyond their boundaries.

Cancer cells are renegades in a collective system. They no longer respect the boundaries of tissues and organs. They grow, divide, and take up resources. Mutations in their individual copies of the genome have silenced the mechanisms that would prompt them to stop growth or to self-destruct. But because they are still the body’s own cells, it is hard for internal protections like the immune system or external ones, like medications, to selectively target cancer cells while leaving the healthy ones alone.

This same challenge makes cancer difficult to detect early. Precancerous cells, those that have already experienced a few predisposing mutations but are not yet growing beyond their bounds, will not show up on imaging. On top of this, cancer is not just one disease, but a collection of over 100 different types, each with their own characteristics, prognosis, and treatment pathway. So while some imaging, such as mammograms for breast cancer, can be conducted routinely, monitoring multiple organ systems for various different cancers on a regular basis would not be feasible.

To better look out for disease, biomedical researchers have turned to a less direct but practical and powerful method—biomarker screening.

What is a biomarker?

The idea of a biological marker, or biomarker, began with monitoring biological systems on a grand scale—gauging the impacts of toxins across an ecosystem, rather than searching for hints of disease within an individual body. The logic of environmental biomarkers was this: toxins may be causing harm at levels that are hard to detect, even with systematic and sensitive sampling. In addition, a measured level of a toxin, such as heavy metals or pesticides, may not easily translate into an understanding of how severe its impact on species in the environment will be. To address these issues, ecologists began looking at direct quantification of biological outcomes: accumulations of toxins within plants or animals, behavioral or reproductive changes, or mortality, for example. These measures are proxies for environmental contaminants and give a more immediate understanding of their severity.

In the context of cancer and many other diseases, the human body can be thought of as an ecosystem. Many different types of cells are living together, exchanging resources and sharing space; the bloodstream circulates nutrients and waste, connecting tissues and organs that are more physically distant from one another. Finding the first few cancerous cells or identifying the early damage of heart disease is difficult. But like toxins in the environment, those changes will prompt a chain reaction of responses throughout the body, which are sometimes easier to find.

While not a disease, one of the most common uses of biomarker testing is found in the form of home pregnancy tests. Before a person can see or feel any evidence of pregnancy, the placenta starts producing the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin to help prepare the body. This eventually leads to elevated levels of this hormone in urine—a testable biomarker to indicate a pregnancy.

One example of a cancer-specific biomarker that may be familiar is prostate-specific antigen. Although medical guidelines have shifted now to other preventative strategies, PSA testing was once a standard practice for early detection and treatment of prostate cancer. PSA is a protein produced by cells in the prostate gland, even when they are healthy. When the prostate is unhealthy, and particularly when cancerous growth has emerged, the unhealthy cells often produce higher levels of PSA. Rather than looking for diseased cells within the prostate, which would be difficult and invasive, doctors performed blood tests for levels of PSA. An elevated level does not definitively prove that cancer is present, but instead prompts a closer investigation so that whatever the cause, it can be identified and treated.

Genomic innovation has aided both the identification of new and informative biomarkers and our ability to detect them. As we learn more about the types of mutations that predispose cells to cancer and help determine what types of treatment might be most effective in eradicating them, we can use these sequences as biomarkers. Sequencing technologies that work faster and with smaller amounts of starting material enable us more often to detect these DNA sequences in the bloodstream, rather than needing to find and biopsy a tumor. These advances enable us to act earlier and more decisively to treat cancer.

A laboratory-grade device that fits in your palm—or your pocket

What is the next step in cancer biomarker research? One small piece of it is ongoing in the laboratory of electrical and computer engineering professor Brian Cunningham at the IGB. A recent news item described how one of his lab members, postdoctoral researcher Han Keun Lee, is working to make cancer biomarker testing as easy and accessible as a home pregnancy test:

“Advances in medical technology have improved our health in part by bringing key aspects of care, once difficult to access, into the home. Tracking symptoms and even screening for certain types of illness outside of a laboratory or clinical setting puts more control into the hands of patients . . . Many home tests work similarly to pregnancy tests or infectious diseases tests such as COVID-19 antigen tests; labeled molecules generate a visible line when a substance of interest is present in the sample, producing a simple positive or negative result. This type of test is relatively affordable and easy to use, but it can have limited sensitivity and often provides only qualitative or semi-quantitative results. A new version of the test strip must also be developed for each new pathogen or biological molecule of interest.

Another type of test, commonly used in the laboratory, can be much more accurate and quantitative because it relies on the measurement of fluorescent dye whose signal can be amplified. But many existing instruments used to read fluorescent signals are not practical for home or point-of-care settings; they are large, expensive, and often require training to use correctly.

Using a simple light detector has its own drawbacks; a single detector does not allow a clear comparison between the sample that comes from the individual being tested and a control sample that provides a baseline negative result. Lee and his colleagues had previously designed a compact, user-friendly device they called the VPod that was able to detect fluorescence signals, but could measure only one sample at a time. Their present publication showcases their improved device, the VPodDuo, which supports a paired test-and-control workflow: this means that it is able to measure the two samples simultaneously.

VPodDuo, like the VPod before it, is also suited to point-of-care settings because of its compatibility with different molecular-assay formats. The device measures green-emitting fluorescence signals generated by several types of detection chemistry, allowing the same reader to be used with tests for different targets. The research team demonstrated that VPodDuo could accurately detect and measure quantities of genetic material from Zika virus, HIV, and methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, as well as human genetic markers indicating the possible presence of cancer cells.

“There is a famous saying that medicine is blind without diagnostics,” Lee said. “The purpose of testing at the point-of-care is not necessarily to give a definitive diagnosis, but rather to allow more frequent testing so that someone has a better chance of receiving timely treatment.”

Parting thoughts

To read more about Lee and Cunningham’s work, you can view IGB’s news item here.

In 2025, when we asked people what was inspiring them, we repeatedly heard that reflecting on the resilience of the scientific process throughout history gave them motivation to be a part of it now and hope for what it can accomplish in the future. Yet the practices of present-day science communication, embedded with a minute-by-minute news ecosystem, don’t always give adequate opportunities to share a sense of scientific history. For our annual report, we decided to try to do both at once, combining shorter stories that focused on the progress of just the past year with much longer ones that explored how a research project progresses over a decade or more. From the director’s message within the report:

A research project that spans decades will inevitably meet setbacks in addition to successes. To achieve the progress we share here—the opening of a first-of-its-kind biological foundry, the establishment of a robust and versatile method for disease detection, insight into the mitigation of an environmental toxin’s impacts—our members moved forward in the face of funding challenges and complex findings. Looking even further back in time, each of these projects shows itself to be grounded in earlier efforts that were similarly driven by pursuit of truth and commitment to advancing the communities we all share.

To visually support this theme of stability and longevity, our designer drew from elements of brutalist architecture, a style born from post-World War II reconstruction efforts. This minimalist, functional aesthetic fit the theme we hoped to convey, that science works because it focuses on finding the truth of how physical form relates to function.

Parting thoughts

Without further preamble, we hope you will take a look at our 2025 Annual Report. Science is here.

Recently, we talked about how agricultural innovations have led to pristine World Cup pitches and taller, higher-yielding corn. This week, we are turning our attention closer to home; a new documentary called “Rooted in Discovery: Agriculture at Illinois” premiered on the Big Ten Network, highlighting the rich history of agriculture research here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One piece of this history is the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency project, an international research effort founded in 2012 with the mission to advance the science and engineering of photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis—the process that all plants use to convert energy from sunlight into biomass—is highly complex, consisting of over 100 steps and involving many different genes and proteins. The RIPE project brings together scientists from across the world to collaborate on this complex problem, including those within our institute’s Photosynthesis and Food Security research theme. By discovering new ways to achieve greater crop yields and improve the plants’ tolerance to stress, the researchers hope to increase food security in the future.

Check out the documentary segment about RIPE Project:

Parting thoughts

We hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about some of the agricultural research happening at Illinois. While today’s post is brief, keep an eye out next week for the 2025 IGB Annual Report!

It’s corn

Corn, which originally derived from teosinte in Mexico, has grown in the continental US for several thousand years. In the 1800s, the phrase “knee-high by the fourth of July” emerged as a simple guide to help farmers gauge the health of their corn crop and loosely predict its end of season yield. Plants that successfully reached this height, easily assessed during a walk through the field, were thought to have good odds of being healthy and producing a solid amount of grain.

How grounded in biology was this assessment? To evaluate it, it’s helpful to understand the phases of corn growth in the field. In corn’s vegetative phase in the first half of the growing season, it puts down roots and gains almost all of its height; ears form, but are not yet pollinated. By the middle of July, most corn has shifted to its reproductive phase, in which the corn is pollinated, the kernels develop on the ears, and the plants dry in the field before harvest.

Even though the corn plant’s growth in height and its kernel production occur in separate phases, they are related. In the vegetative phase, factors including temperature, sunlight, access to nutrients, amount of rainfall, and overall health can impact the growth of the plant. Importantly, these factors also impact development, which is different from growth—it relates to how the plant is moving through stages of leaf and ear formation, and is a stronger predictor of eventual yield.

At the time when farmers were looking for knee-high corn, though, they could not rely on the vast catalog of shared agricultural knowledge we now have, thanks in part to land-grant institutional research. They had no mechanical or automated farming equipment to help them monitor plant health and growth. This saying was a decent guide and an effective way to make actionable information about farming available. As eloquently put by Lila Nolan, a dairy farmer in White Creek, New York:

However, the enduring legacy of the phrase is evident in its continued use in agricultural education and community discussions. It symbolizes a connection to the past and a recognition of the progress made in farming techniques. Agricultural educators often use the phrase to teach students about the history of farming, illustrating how traditional knowledge has evolved alongside modern innovations.

How tall is tall enough?

Humans have grown taller in the last century predominantly because of environmental factors: a lessened impact of infectious disease and better access to good nutrition. For corn and other crop plants, environmental factors such as better fertilization technologies and more sophisticated pest control have acted in combination with breeding, including direct or indirect selection for greater height. Beyond grain yield, the stem of harvested corn, or stover, can be fed into alternative uses such as biofuel production; the greater the height, the more biomass to work with.

Recently, though, attention has turned to the advantage of a shorter corn plant. Multiple breeding efforts, including one led by Corteva Agriscience and a collaboration between Purdue University and Bayer, are working on developing shorter corn varieties. The plants, somewhere between two and four feet shorter than comparable and currently farmed varieties, can be planted in narrower rows, meaning more plants can fit in a field. The plants are more stable, and more resilient to severe weather that might knock over taller plants. Pesticides and other treatments may penetrate the canopy more easily.

Summer sweet corn is a delightful tradition. Growing enough corn—the world’s third-largest grain crop—to help address food security is a vital mission. We hope that this type of innovation can continue to be part of our traditions as well.

Parting thoughts

For a deeper dive on corn growth and many other agricultural matters, you can explore the solid and thorough Illinois Farmdoc website, including this related article on corn production. If you simply want to enjoy some summer sweet corn, enjoy this science-related tip: there are plenty of right ways to cook corn (grill, steam, boil, bake, even microwave) but for the sweetest experience, do it fast and keep it short. Once an ear of corn is picked, enzymes within the kernels begin to convert the sugars to tougher, less-sweet tasting starches. After about 24 hours, half of the sugar is gone. Brief heating disables these enzymes; longer heating does their work for them, making the corn chewy and bland.

^{Pollinators visiting flowers at the University of Illinois Bee Research Lab / Corinne Campbell}

Dancing Bees

For honey bees in particular, a fascinating answer to these questions came from the chance observation of an Austrian scientist just over a century ago. Karl von Frisch studied honey bees throughout his decades of animal behavior research. In 1919, while observing the egg-laying behavior of honey bee queens within small glass-walled hives, he noticed that the worker bees, daughters of the queen that perform housekeeping and other tasks within the colony, were adjusting their food-collecting efforts according to whether the dish of sugar water he set out for them was full or empty. The foraging honey bees would industriously shuttle the sugar water from the feeder to the hive, reducing their activity as supplies ran low.

Frisch’s key observation occurred when he refilled the feeder. Once a bee had discovered the fresh food and returned to the hive, he saw her making a repeated and distinctive figure-8 shaped path on the honeycomb within that he named the “round dance.” He documented how the other bees responded to the dancer, following her throughout her circling motions and, soon after, leaving the hive to travel to the feeder themselves. In the years of research that followed, Frisch discovered that the round dance is a curtailed version of one of the best-known behaviors of the honey bee: the waggle dance.

The most basic functions of the round and waggle dances are essentially the same. Both enable worker bees to recruit their hivemates to a nearby food source, whether a feeder or a flower, so that the colony can forage more efficiently. What the waggle dance adds is a symbolic representation of where that food source is. Frisch’s work and decades of subsequent bee research have revealed how this works.

^{The Waggle Dance / OakleyOriginals}

Like the round dance, waggle dancing bees loop first to one side, then to the other, as other bees follow them on the honeycomb inside the hive. In between each loop, the dancing bee runs in a straight line, vigorously shaking the end of her body (the “waggle” of the name.) Two key pieces of locational information are conveyed in this action. The exact angle of the repeated waggle run represents the angle with respect to the sun that a following bee should fly to reach the food source. The duration of each waggle phase represents the distance the bee should keep flying to get there; when the food is close by, the waggle shrinks to nothing and becomes the simple center of the round dance.

These basic components may sound simple. To produce the dance, a bee tracks her wandering vectors of travel as she searches for a patch of flowers, then calculates a straight “beeline” back to the hive. She reverses that line, continuously adjusts its directionality with relation to the movement of the sun over the course of the day, and transposes that directionality onto the vertical surface of the comb. Neuroscientists have learned a great deal about how brains work by asking how the tiny bee brain is able to do all this. Another compelling question is an evolutionary one: how does a behavior this complex emerge over generations?

Where did the waggle dance come from?

The honey bee species that many of us are familiar with is Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, is just one of perhaps eight different honey bee species among more than 20,000 bee species around the world. A few of the other honey bee species provide a clue for how the waggle dance might have evolved. Martin Lindauer, a German behavioral scientist and student of Frisch, was the first to propose an evolutionary hypothesis for how the evolution of the waggle dance might have progressed.

Dwarf honey bees, found in Asia, do not live in the type of enclosed nest that western honey bees do. Instead, it performs its waggle runs on an open horizontal surface directly toward a food source. It is possible to envision how this could have emerged from an even simpler action—a few performative feints at taking off in actual flight toward the food, perhaps with nestmates alongside. Giant honey bees, also found in Asia, display the directional transposition that dwarf honey bees do not, dancing on an open vertical surface of the nest and converting the flight direction to fit the plane of the dance. From there, selection may have acted to promote features, such as sound cues, that enabled bees to follow each other’s dances in the darkness of an enclosed hive like that of Apis mellifera.

Western honey bees have provided a great deal to human society over the course of our shared history: honey to sweeten our meals, pollination to enrich our plant harvest, and fascinating behaviors that have added to our understanding of nature and of the brain. The evolutionary perspective on the dance language is also a reminder of how many other bee species there are, and how much they offer us. In addition, we would be remiss to leave out the many other vital animal pollinators of the world, including butterflies, beetles, and the much-maligned wasps and bats. Next time you see one visiting a flower, consider whispering a thank you—it won’t mind.

Parting thoughts

Honey bees are just one of many pollinator species that we depend on help produce foods, spices, medicines, and more. In the United States alone, we can thank pollinating insects for generating $40 billion worth of products annually. Unfortunately, worldwide populations of pollinators are on the decline due reasons like loss of their native habitats, exposure to diseases, or takeovers by invasive species. The good news? There are ways we can help pollinators in our own neighborhoods! Check out these resources to learn more about National Pollinator Week and to get started on your own pollinator-friendly garden or plant a “pollinator pocket” of flowers in your neighborhood:

• https://www.xerces.org/blog/how-to-make-pollinator-garden

• https://extension.illinois.edu/cfiv/pollinator-pockets

• https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator-week

What is grass, actually?

Grasses are ubiquitous, found in all parts and climates of the world: the arctic tundra, alpine mountains, flatland prairies, forests, deserts, wetlands, and more. With over 10,000 identified species, grass has served as a critical resource for human society for many years. Species like wheat, corn, millet, sorghum, and rice are food staples across the world, while other grasses are used for structural support, biofuel, or paper pulp.

Despite this wide diversity, and our long history of reliance on grasses, manicured lawns, athletic fields, and golf courses are often the first thing to come to mind when we consider this plant. These types of grasses are called turfgrasses, and among the diversity of grass species, there are only about 25 to 30 different turfgrass types. To be considered a turfgrass, a species must grow in a contiguous community across a field. While other grasses like corn or wheat grow once and then are harvested for the season, turfgrasses can keep growing when repeatedly eaten or mowed. They are also particularly good at tolerating traffic, bouncing back after being matted down by things like running, jumping, cars parking, or soccer balls rolling. Originally evolving with grazing animals, these qualities have cemented turfgrass as a mainstay in modern society, providing the ideal surface for lawn games and athletic competition.

Searching for the turfgrass MVP

20 years ago, less-than-ideal soccer pitches and their associated unpredictability were just part of the game; both teams were playing on the same field conditions after all. From recreational kids’ games up to the highest professional levels, it was common to see players coated in mud on a rainy day or observe brown, dead patches of grass in high traffic areas like in front of the goals. But as the game has evolved over time and technology has progressed, field standards have elevated significantly.

FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, has a long list of specifications and requirements for 2026 World Cup-quality pitches to meet. The fields must be made of natural, living grass and are thoroughly tested to make sure they are up to par—like dropping a ball from 2.0 meters and confirming it bounces back up between 0.6 to 1.0 meter. The surface must also be durable and resilient enough to handle many games and ceremonies. Importantly, the 2026 fields must be uniform and behave consistently in all 16 stadiums across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

The 2018 and 2022 World Cup stadiums and fields, held in Russia and Qatar respectively, were built specifically for each tournament. In 2026, the games are taking place in 16 preexisting stadiums, each responsible for providing and maintaining grass fields that meet FIFA’s standards. In Qatar, the longest commute between two stadiums was 48 miles, while thousands of miles separate the 2026 venues, which span three climates. On top of this, five are domed, limiting the amount of light available for grass to grow, and eight have permanent artificial turf that must be covered with temporary grass.

To meet the challenge, FIFA turned to turfgrass researchers John Sorochan (University of Tennessee) and John Rogers (Michigan State University). Since 2018, their teams carried out over 150 different research projects, trying to answer a number of questions. What types of turfgrasses are best? How should the grasses be grown? How can the surface be reinforced to be stronger and more durable? How can the sod be transported, installed, and kept alive for 40 days of tournament play in each stadium?

Creating the 2026 World Cup fields came from a combination of plant biology, agricultural research, and engineering. Sorochan and Rogers aimed to develop turfgrass surfaces that players and spectators didn’t notice; if done right, the fields blend into the background, leaving the focus on the sport. In 2018, Sorochan also developed a system called fLEX to test the fields. The fLEX device features a 3D printed foot that is covered with a soccer shoe and numerous sensors to model the physics of how the players interact with turfgrass. With this technology, they measured parameters like force, recoil, and traction, testing different turfgrasses and mixtures to create fields that were tailored to the location and infrastructure of each stadium.

Turfgrass on the world (cup) stage

Different species of turfgrass have evolved and adapted to grow well in their native environments. This is due to the unique set of genes that are embedded in each of their genomes—an organism’s DNA instruction manual for life. Grasses living in different climates have their own growth rates, moisture requirements, and ideal mow heights. Depending on their unique characteristics, some types of turfgrass are more resilient, making them better at handling the repeated wear and tear of soccer. Bermudagrass, for example, is well-suited for athletics because it spreads through the soil via horizontal-growing stems, called rhizomes and stolons, that help to knit the turf together to create a more durable surface.

A warm-climate plant that grows well in hot environments, bermudagrass was used for southern, outdoor stadiums such as Miami and Guadalajara. But with its adaptations for warm weather, the grass’s growth suffers with shorter days, less light, and cooler temperatures. Cool weather-adapted plants can grow better with less sunlight, but can dry out and die on longer and hotter days. This made the cool season grasses more ideal for northern locations like Philadelphia and Toronto and high-altitude Mexico City. These stadiums were installed with a sod composed of a mixture of 84% Kentucky bluegrass and 16% Perennial ryegrass. Kentucky bluegrass was chosen because it spreads well underground and gradually repairs itself. Perennial ryegrass, another cool season grass, is less durable and more prone to divots when planted alone. But it germinates quickly, which helps the turf surface to quickly recover from damage when paired with the Kentucky bluegrass.

Though cities like Atlanta and Houston have warm climates, their stadiums also used the mixture of cool season grasses. This is because the five domed stadiums block the sun’s rays from reaching the field, so warm-adapted grasses can’t grow well with the limited light. Every day, the venues are also using magenta-colored LED grow lights to supplement natural sunlight to keep the grassy fields healthy and happy.

Parting Thoughts

Beyond considering the biology of different species and cultivated variants of turfgrasses, developing and installing the 2026 World Cup fields was a large feat of engineering and logistics. After selecting, planting, and growing the sod, it needed to be harvested, transported hundreds to thousands of miles, and installed to create the stadium fields. These had to be ready for tournament play in less than two weeks and kept alive through 40 days of wear and tear. We can only begin to brush the surface of these interesting innovations, so here are some places you can dive in more!

https://theconversation.com/we-designed-the-turf-for-soccers-biggest-world-cup-ever-heres-how-we-created-the-same-playing-experience-across-3-countries-279536

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/SOCCER-WORLDCUP/GRASS/lbvgyqdnxvq/

https://msutoday.msu.edu/turfgrass

https://www.utk.edu/turfgrass/

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/world-cup-will-be-played-rutgers-turfgrass

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you first become interested in teaching?

That’s easy! When I moved to this town from California, I didn’t have a job. I volunteered in my son’s classroom, and I fell in love. The teacher actually took me seriously. She gave me a real task: I worked with a little boy who needed help reading. After about three months of this I thought, I totally love this. I went back to school to become a teacher.

So you were going back to school to learn how to teach while your kids were going to school themselves. How old were your kids at the time?

My children were nine, seven, and four. It wasn’t the easiest thing, I guess. It was a struggle. Also, there were a lot of assignments that kept me up late at night while I was also raising children.

What was your job before that? How different was it?

I was, for many years, a professional fundraiser—a darn good one. I don’t have any shyness. You’re helping people, and a lot of the skills that teachers use are the very same ones fundraisers use. Relationship building, getting to know everyone, and figuring out who they are. That is the same, teaching or fundraising.

It seems like those two jobs, fundraising and teaching, have been blended into the job you have now. How did that happen?

By chance, the year I moved to middle school teaching, we got a federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant. I was hired to be the magnet site coordinator of the grant for my school to develop a schoolwide STEAM program. And the rest is history. I’ve been doing it ever since.

How did you end up working so closely with the IGB?

In 2018, I started in my new position as the grant person. We weren’t partners yet. IGB had reached out to one of my colleagues and I said, hey, can we do more stuff with you? That’s how this all started. I hate to sound hyperbolic, but it’s been a dream. We’re able to offer field trips, dissections, art programs, music, field trips to campus museums and facilities, and an after-school STEAM club—even during the pandemic, when no one else was doing anything, we did it online in 2021. I’m not a scientist, so having people to think things through with us has been really helpful. Going into the wet lab, doing projects that would be really hard at school, these opportunities are good for kids.

What makes teaching science to kids so important?

Science is the subject that can pull kids in, because what is requires is observation, and everyone can observe. A kid may be struggling with reading, with writing, with math; science gives them a challenge that they can meet. It gives them a time when they can feel like scholars and be engaged.

I was in the hallway once, and I heard two kids talking about all the science documentaries they watch after school. I never realized before, there are a lot of kids who are fascinated by things you wouldn’t guess they are. I believe there’s no human that isn’t fascinated by science. I think that we undersell that.

We talk about kids who aren’t interested in learning. Now, they might not be interested in everything we’re teaching them, but I know kids are interested in science. Just listening to the group of kids I’m with today, they’re discussing space phenomena and how to identify them. “That’s a black hole.” “No, it’s not a black hole.” Kids also love things that are alive. If you’re doing a dissection, cutting open a grasshopper, it’s so cool to a kid to think, oh my gosh, I also have organs inside me. I think that depth is something the kids need more of. They want to know more.

What is something especially memorable you have done with students?

I used to do a project where kids wrote books about animals. They did the research; they could pick whatever they wanted. I got a little alarmed, because parents were coming, and for some reason I just couldn’t figure out how to create biomes in my room from all the different animals they had chosen. I said to the kids, Okay, everybody on the carpet, sit down. How can we organize this? And literally, in 45 minutes, we had five different biomes that made sense. We had fresh water, we had the sea, we had a jungle, I don’t know how the trees got built so fast. I was so relieved. That, to me, taught me everything I know. Now I know this about teaching, to trust the kids. If you don’t, you’re never going to get such creative ideas.

What else would you like people to know about teaching science?

I had a university group coming into the school monthly to lead engineering projects, and I would say to teachers, send me your fidgety kids. Those kids who participated turned out to be so incredibly good at construction, silently building something like a bridge. They were good at thinking through, what supplies do we need? I wish people could see number one, how collaborative they were. Number two, how good they were at planning. And number three, how good they were with the timeline of finishing things. Because it was theirs, because they were motivated by a challenge. I think we need to remember that.

So, what exactly is chirality? And what makes chiral DNA nanostructures promising for cancer drug development? Let’s dive into it.

What makes cancer so hard to treat?

Treating cancer is a particularly difficult problem because it begins with genetic changes to a person’s own cells. Even though there are common changes across types of cancers, the same type varies widely in how it develops and behaves, not only from person to person, but also within different parts of the same tumor. But a grand challenge of cancer drug development is finding ways to kill these cancer cells without harming healthy tissue as well. Many chemotherapeutics, for example, can eliminate rapidly dividing cancer cells, but simultaneously harm other fast-growing cells like those found in hair follicles or the lining of the digestive system.

To eliminate these side effects, drug design strategies look for more precise approaches that only affect the cancer cells. One avenue is finding or designing molecules that can bind to biological targets specific to the cancer cells—like a key fitting into a particular lock—setting off the cascade of events that lead to cancer cell death. This type of targeted treatment already exists; antibody therapies used for treating some types of cancers are one such example. Many other types remain difficult to treat, however, and researchers are continuously trying to improve these and develop new approaches to benefit patients. In this study, Wang’s group is turning to chirality as a means of precisely controlling these binding interactions.

“Drug delivery often just focused on the binding affinity to the target biomarkers. But, in our paper, we are showing people that spatial patterning is also very important for drug design,” said Tingjie Song, a postdoctoral researcher in Wang’s group and co-first author of the study.

What is chirality?

The most common analogy for talking about chirality is right in front of you. For most people, the left and right hand are the same in structure, but are mirror images. While they can be lined up opposite to each other, the hands are non-superimposable. Similar in structure, gloves can be chiral or achiral—lacking directionality. Cheap pairs of plastic or fabric gloves, for example, are designed to be able to be worn on either hand; with an extra plane of symmetry, these are considered achiral.

For many chemicals, this same principle applies. Two molecules can be made of the same atoms, connected in the same way, but have entirely different properties if they are chiral. One familiar example is the artificial sweetener aspartame. One form of aspartame is able to bind to the sweetness taste receptors on the tongue. But when aspartame has a different chirality, it can no longer fit into the same receptor, instead resulting in a bitter taste.

In essence, chirality is describing how molecular structures take up three-dimensional spaces. What makes Wang’s research interesting is that his team was able to generate structural chirality in tube-shaped DNA nanostructures.

Building the DNA scaffold

Throughout history, people have continuously found new ways to repurpose existing materials. One example of this is paper, invented to help humans communicate through writing and now used for seemingly endless purposes: packaging, toilet paper, wallpaper, pet litter, the list goes on. First documented in China about 2000 years ago, papermaking was revolutionary at the time, replacing more expensive and inconvenient writing surfaces. In Japan, paper eventually took on a new purpose—and dimension—through the art of origami. By precisely folding a piece paper back and forth many times, origami artists can form 3D structures of all shapes and sizes. Once a thin, flat writing surface, the paper becomes the scaffolding and structural support.

Inspired by origami, modern nanotechnology researchers have repurposed a surprising material for 3D construction: DNA. At first, this might seem a bit odd. Why would we use the molecule of our genomes, the instruction manual for supporting life, to make 3D shapes? In previous posts, we have discussed how DNA’s unique molecular structure is specialized for storing information. As it turns out, these same properties make it ideal for building nanoscopic structures.

As a refresher, DNA’s double helix structure resembles a twisted ladder, with each rung composed of two bonded chemicals called nucleotide bases. Like letters can be mixed and matched into words and sentences to convey information, DNA uses four nucleotide bases (adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine) that can be combined into different orders and lengths to code for the genes that drive life’s processes. Another key aspect of DNA’s form is its two-stranded, complementary structure. The two strands are highly stable when bonded together, which helps keep DNA safe from degradation. These bonds are also complementary, so adenine always pairs with thymine, and guanine with cytosine.

DNA’s stability and the clear logic behind its complementary base pairing make it a prime candidate for designing and building custom shapes. For DNA origami, a long strand of DNA is folded back and forth many times to make a 3D structure, held together like glue by bonded nucleotide bases. Like folding paper in particular spots will change its eventual 3D shape, researchers have control over how the DNA folds, allowing them to customize these scaffolds relatively easily.

Chiral nanostructures for drug delivery

“[Tingjie Song] basically came up this idea where we can take something non-chiral, which is the aptamers, and put them into a chiral structure collectively,” Wang said. “Once you put them on the DNA nanostructure, we can make it either left-handed or right-handed.” The aptamers he is referring too are small pieces of single-stranded DNA. The team used aptamers that can specifically bind to CD117 receptors, which are located on the surface of acute myeloid leukemia cells.

To build their chiral nanostructures, Song first started by designing a tubed-shaped DNA scaffold. At this point, the DNA tube is achiral. The aptamers were then attached to docking sites located on the tube, which come in the form of exposed DNA sequences that are complementary to part of the aptamers’ DNA code. Song strategically positioned these sites on the nanostructure’s surface to creating a spiral pattern of aptamers. The team made both the left-handed and right-handed version, called L-CAP and R-CAP, short for chiral aptamer pattern.

To visualize this, we can think about nails and screws found in a toolbox. Before attaching the aptamers, the DNA tube is like a nail: achiral because it is smooth and symmetrical around its axis. While L-CAP and R-CAP are the same structure, their patterned-aptamers spiral in opposite directions around the DNA tube, loosely resembling screws. Due to the direction of their helical threading, most screws are turned clockwise, or to the right, to tighten. This is where the mnemonic “lefty loosey, righty tighty” comes from. But some situations, like securing the left pedal of a bike from falling off, require the less common left-handed screw, which instead must be driven counterclockwise due to its opposite chirality.

Like a left bike pedal, Wang’s team found that L-CAP was preferred when they tested the biological activity of their chiral nanostructures on acute myeloid leukemia cells, observing what got into the cells and what didn’t. “After two hours of incubation, we found out that for the left-handed structures, there is a higher signal from the cells,” said postdoctoral researcher Abhisek Dwivedy, co-first author of the paper. “This was interesting to us because other than the handedness, the structures were exactly the same.”

The team further investigated why the cells showed preferred uptake of L-CAP, employing both experiments and computer-based modeling to confirm it was a result of the spatial patterning of the aptamers. This is significant, because using structural chirality, they were able to change the biological activity of the exact same aptamer.

They then tested if the nanostructures could be a way to deliver cancer drugs by attaching them to Daunorubicin, a chemotherapeutic used for acute myeloid leukemia that is known to have many toxic side effects.

“We saw more loss of cell viability as compared to the right-handed structures, suggesting that left-handed structures can not only selectively bind and internalize to the cells, but this this property can also be used to selectively deliver a payload, which in our case was the drug,” Dwivedy said.

This finding is exciting because it demonstrates that structural chirality can offer a new path for targeted cancer therapy. On top of this, their strategy is modular, and both DNA nanostructures and aptamers are relatively easy to design and customize. This provides an avenue to expand this technology for many types of cancers.

“We can make a left-handed, right-handed, or achiral structure, or make different pitches between the adjacent aptamers, using the same platform with different docking sites. That makes it really easy and robust,” Wang said.

Parting thoughts

If you are intrigued by chirality and enjoy Golden Age detective fiction, you might enjoy The Documents in the Case, a 1930 mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace. Without giving away too much, the plot of this epistolary novel can be described as taking a chiral twist.

Their outreach initiative, called the Mobile Bioengineering Lab, has grown into a partnership with two local middle school classes and an engaging collection of STEM workshop materials. Within the familiar walls of their school, kids can see DNA and watch an organism regenerate, and envision themselves as active members of a scientific field that can sound obscure and intimidating.

“Bioengineering is a very inaccessible discipline . . . most people have never heard of it until they get to college,” said Katie Zobus, a recent graduate with dual degrees in bioengineering and chemistry.

Zobus recognized a need to introduce students to the field earlier. Reflecting on her own experiences growing up in Sherman, Illinois, she realized how many students in grade school lack exposure to bioengineering.

“I’m from a very rural area, and I didn’t have many opportunities,” Zobus said. “I had no clue what [bioengineering] was. I think that I just picked it because I really liked biology, and I googled stem cell jobs and saw you need a bioengineering degree. Stem cells sounded cool when I was a kid.”

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When Zobus matriculated to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she soon learned about the annual Engineering Open House. This student-run STEM fair brings thousands of people to campus to learn about science and engineering, allowing people of all ages to take part in hands-on activities. Through conversations with local educators, Zobus learned that more frequent engagement opportunities were in high demand. This kickstarted Zobus to think about how she could bring the bioengineering beyond the campus, into the community.

Shriya Wagholikar, a rising senior majoring in bioengineering and minoring in computer science, has been part of the team since its inception. Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, Wagholikar learned about the field of bioengineering early on, surrounded by the Bay Area’s thriving biotechnology industry. As she was about to start her first year at Illinois, Wagholikar received an email from Zobus inviting new freshmen to join a science discussion group run by Zobus; when Zobus proposed her idea for the Mobile Bioengineering Lab, Wagholikar was immediately on board.

“In high school, I also did a similar outreach program in charter schools in the Bay Area,” Wagholikar said. “But a large part of the work that I did in high school was over COVID. So, I was excited to get back into a classroom and work hands-on with kids instead of just teaching them over Zoom.”

The group first brought their bioengineering workshops to International Prep Academy, a bilingual school in Champaign. Collaborating with science teacher Geoffrey Freymouth, the team worked with middle schoolers in his classes on a range of topics from introducing the field of bioengineering to hands-on activities like extracting DNA from strawberries and observing the regeneration of planarians, a flatworm with rapid regrowth capabilities.

“I feel like I’ve understood bioengineering a lot more just through running these workshops and participating in it,” said Asheera Kaul.

Kaul, a major in bioengineering with a minor in electrical engineering, is from Bengaluru, India and joined the Mobile Bioengineering Lab team in 2025, just as they were beginning a second collaboration with Garden Hills Academy.

“I’m an international student, and I didn’t have a lot of hands-on science activities in my school. If I’m being very honest, most of the workshops we do, I do for the first time when we’re teaching it, and I find it very exciting. I also feel like a little kid,” Kaul said.

Anna Maria Olarov also started volunteering with the group during the Fall 2025 semester, before joining the core team in January. She is a rising junior from Naperville, Illinois majoring in bioengineering with minors in chemistry and electrical engineering.

“My favorite thing is just seeing the moment when all the concepts we’ve been talking about, when all the workshops that we’ve been doing, start to click in the student’s mind,” Olarov said. “That’s the best part of outreach or any kind of teaching. You can see them get excited about it and you can see them gain confidence.”

Beyond running the activities and learning to work with middle school students, Kaul and her fellow core team members continue to develop new workshop materials.

“The team is very connected,” Kaul said. “Everyone is invested in the mission, so it makes working gratifying, and it’s a very fulfilling sort of work to do in college.”

Parting Thoughts

Initiatives like these exemplify the motto of the IGB - where science meets society. Many scientists, including members of our own outreach team, have fond memories of participating in hands-on science activities in school, and many went on to pursue science because of those experiences. So, we want to know if you have ever done hands-on science activities before. If so, what was your most memorable experience? Let us know in the comments what it was and why it was so memorable.

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A few weeks ago, we shared a preview of this year’s Art of Science show. Next week brings the end of the show’s run at Analog Wine Library in Urbana. To mark this conclusion, we are featuring one of the pieces from the show, one that brings to light the processes that hide deep within our bones. How do our bodies make blood? How do we study processes that take place within such a protected tissue? How can we turn two-dimensional images into a 3-dimensional understanding of structure? Peer into a forest of layered forms to find out.

Bone marrow and cell birth

Red marrow. The soft tissue in the spaces between trabeculae of spongy bone in the sternum and other flat and irregular bones.

In this year’s show, one piece in particular stood out, both metaphorically and quite literally. “So built the screen you had begun,” a series of carefully cut silhouettes formed by cells from bone marrow, hung to fold out from the wall to form the effect of a cobwebbed tunnel. It is based on the work of Gunnar Thompson, a member of chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Brendan Harley’s laboratory. Thompson and other members of the research group are interested in how stem cells embedded within bone marrow produce the various types of cells that populate our blood.

Within the edges of our flat bones are pockets of red marrow called niches. The niches harbor stem cells that divide to replenish the red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets that circulate in blood. The stem cells don’t do this work alone; they are surrounded by support cells that protect and feed the stem cells and their daughters. Together, endothelial cells that line the blood vessels of the marrow and stromal cells beside them provide physical support, nutrients, and chemical signals that guide blood cell development.

An overarching goal of Thompson’s research is to eavesdrop on these signals, clarifying their functions in both healthy marrow and in the disease states of blood disorders like leukemia. To do this, he brings these cells out of the body, growing them in a specially designed substance called a hydrogel. The hydrogel’s firm, Jello-like consistency replicates the environment of the bone marrow and allows chemical signals to diffuse between the cells.

Collagen. A strong, fibrous insoluble protein found in connective tissue, including the dermis, tendons, ligaments, deep fascia, bone, and cartilage. Collagen is the protein forming the matrix of trabecular bone proper.

To study the growth of the endothelial and stromal cells within the hydrogel, Thompson colors them with fluorescent dyes—green for the endothelial cells and blue for the stromal cells. To get a complete picture of how they are arrayed within the three-dimensional gel, he uses a confocal microscope. This type of instrument uses layers to light up one plane of a sample at a time, unblurred by the layers of cells below and above. Imaging software can then be used to reassemble these two-dimensional images into a digital model with depth.

Swinging silhouettes

Hematopoiesis is the process of forming blood cells and blood cell components whereby pluripotent stem cells give rise to progenitor cells capable of terminally differentiating into either the myeloid or lymphoid lineages.

Speaking with Thompson gave Pollack a sense of his approach to biology: asking how to build a space for cells outside the body in order to answer questions about what usually happens inside it. She set out to find a way to capture the structural feel of the cell network she was seeing in the microscopic images.

Pollack printed the image in high-contrast black and white and then traced the forms of the cells, noting the lacey structure of their projections. She decided to cut out the negative space around the structures to get a better sense of their shapes and forms. After spending hours tracing and cutting the original image and reflecting on her conversation with Thompson, Pollack focused in on the movement of the cells through the substance over time.

Pollack contacted Thompson, who sent a different version of the images back. These were closer to how the microscope interprets them, as a presence or absence of light from different lasers, before the fluorescent dye colors are represented for human eyes. Instead of just one cut out silhouette drawing, Pollack decided to recreate the stacked images of the data set. She hoped to produce a layered experience with cut-outs so that people could walk between, moving in the hydrogel with the cells.

Proliferation. Rapid and repeated reproduction of new parts, as by cell division.

As Pollack selected layers from Thompson’s set of images and traced them, she explored both digital and physical tracing. The clean lines of vector drawing with a pen tool did not capture the organic shape of the biological images. Similarly, cutting out the silhouettes with a machine or laser cutter lost the lacey, bone-like aesthetic of the cell shapes.

To draw viewers in toward each of the paper layers, Pollack worked with science writer Claudia Lutz to excerpt facts about bone marrow, stem cells, and blood cells from a medical encyclopedia. With this addition, viewers were encouraged to move closer to each component of the piece and engage with their biological context as well as their physical forms.

Pollack printed the work to scale and cut the negative space, carefully cutting the lacey forms out of the paper and watching it slowly change to reveal an authentic, living shape. The result was a series of delicate structures that reflected the biological reality of the original images and were inviting to close viewing. This created a challenge echoing that of the original research: how could the pieces be hung in a way that allowed observation, while still protecting the cells inside?

Pollack reached out to a friend, Ben Barnes, with this artistic and engineering challenge. As a long-time informal engineering consultant to friends, Barnes was able to design an elegant solution that could be quickly implemented. Each paper cut-out would be suspended from a hanger that was attached to the wall panel of the gallery with a hinge. This allowed each layer to swing out for viewing, and to fold flat against the wall for protection.

We hope those in the Champaign-Urbana area are join us next Thursday, May 28^th at 7 pm to see this work in person and hear more stories about the art. This is the last of four more dates to view Art of Science 16.0 at the gallery in Analog. It can also be viewed on these preceding dates:

Thursday May 21st 5–10 pm
Friday May 22nd 5–11 pm
Saturday May 23rd 5–11 pm

Parting thoughts

Each art of science piece is titled with a word or phrase that attempts to capture its scientific and artistic origins. This work’s title, “So built the screen you had begun” is a quote from a Robert Frost poem, “The Exposed Nest”. Like the young birds in the poem, the cells in these images have been exposed by human machinations; like the narrator’s wife in the poem, the researchers have worked to reconstruct a nest that adequately protects them. Just as in the poem, additional help was received partway through the production of the art to help complete a structure that would support it.

The Exposed Nest
Robert Frost

You were forever finding some new play.  
So when I saw you down on hands and knees  
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,  
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,  
I went to show you how to make it stay,  
If that was your idea, against the breeze,  
And, if you asked me, even help pretend  
To make it root again and grow afresh.  
But 'twas no make-believe with you to-day,  
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,  
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,  
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover.  
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground  
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over  
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)  
And left defenseless to the heat and light.  
You wanted to restore them to their right  
Of something interposed between their sight  
And too much world at once—could means be found.  
The way the nest-full every time we stirred  
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird  
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,  
Made me ask would the mother-bird return  
And care for them in such a change of scene  
And might our meddling make her more afraid.  
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.  
We saw the risk we took in doing good,  
But dared not spare to do the best we could  
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen  
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.  
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then  
No more to tell? We turned to other things.  
I haven't any memory—have you?— 
Of ever coming to the place again  
To see if the birds lived the first night through,  
And so at last to learn to use their wings. 

An unexpected outbreak

Before the last few weeks, hantavirus has sporadically appeared in the news as a rodent-transmitted virus, deadly but rare. Typically traveling between rodents—their natural hosts—via saliva and urine, hantaviruses remain largely off our radar. But humans can be exposed through indirect contact with infected rodent droppings, often when cleaning out buildings, basements, and garages. In the United States, hantaviruses are most prevalent in the southwestern states; public health guidance in these areas emphasizes precautionary actions and careful handling of rodent droppings to avoid infection. Because exposure is manageable and infection is rare in humans, no vaccine has been developed for hantavirus, despite its severity.

To address the cruise ship outbreak, public health officials first needed to clarify how multiple people became infected over time in a limited environment. Most hantaviruses, including the common types in the US, can only be spread to humans through direct or indirect contact with infected rodents. For this reason, it was initially thought that infected rodents may be on board the ship, or that exposure occurred at prior stops. However, more recently, health officials shared the finding that individuals from the cruise ship were infected with Andes virus. This outlier in the hantavirus family, first identified in Argentina and Chile, can be passed from person to person.

Other outlets have reported how public and individual health strategies have been shaped by this finding. Thanks in part to this information pinpointing the identity of the virus and its mode of transmission, there is a strong chance of containing the outbreak from here. But how did scientists figure this out so quickly, and with such a high degree of certainty? We owe much of our modern ability to trace outbreaks to genomics.

Tracing the genomic roots of disease

To understand how genomics can help us identify viruses, it may help to consider what they are made of. Last week, we considered the difficulties of visually classifying the microscopic features of bacteria. Viruses are typically more than 10 times smaller than most bacteria and cannot be seen with a light microscope—careful imaging with electron microscopes has helped to reveal their basic structure.

While they come in many different shapes and sizes, each type of viral particle consists of a small genome surrounded by a shell or capsid made of protein for protection. They contain no molecular machinery for DNA replication or transcription, no ribosomes for RNA translation, and no mitochondria for energy production, instead hijacking the systems of the host they infect. Viral construction is so minimalist that there is long-standing debate about whether they are even living.

With so few components, the viral genetic material and the proteins encoded by that material become the most reliable distinguishing features of viruses. As we discussed in a previous post, viral infections can be identified with lab methods that look for the proteins or make copies of specific viral gene sequences; these tests have become routine for common viruses. To sleuth out the identity of less common viruses or differentiate between different strains, directly reading the viral genome sequence can be the most helpful.

The more closely two organisms are related, the more similar their genome sequences are expected to be—from the near-identical genes of homozygous twins to the recognizably similar sequences of different varieties of corn. Viruses follow the same pattern, with sequences that are copied within one strain and shift as new strains emerge. A dataset of viral genome sequences can therefore act as a historical record and a family tree, hinting at where and when an outbreak started and how it has spread.

Even the most basic descriptors of viral genomes hold clues about the identity of the virus. Some made of DNA, but others RNA. Some are one long strand, while others are broken up: three segments for hantavirus, and eight for influenza, for example. Hantaviruses contain genomes made of RNA; when the RNA is converted to DNA and sequenced, the resulting series of As, Ts, Cs and Gs can be compared to the ever-growing databases of already sequenced viral genomes.

In addition to its precision, an advantage of genome sequencing to identify viruses is its speed. Modern genomic technologies enable scientists to read and analyze viral genomes within days; the hantavirus samples from the MV Hondius outbreak yielded publicly shared results within about a week. Sequencing does not rely on designing specialized reagents, as rapid tests and PCR tests do. It therefore also has the advantage of being open-ended. Even if those responding to the outbreak had not suspected the presence of Andes virus based on the pattern of infections, sequencing would have revealed it.

Sequencing viral genomes gives us a powerful tool to address outbreaks in the moment. It also helps us to build our catalog of known viruses to use as a reference during future health events. We recognized the Andes virus because we have read its genome before, and that recognition let health workers apply lessons learned in a 2018 outbreak in Argentina to help those impacted by the cruise ship outbreak in the present. In databases throughout the world, we have the sequences of many other disease-causing viruses, a reference of known pathogens that form a societal line of defense against future outbreaks. Every genome we sequence, every data point we add, strengthens this communal immune system.

Parting thoughts

For more about viruses and how they move through the world of animal hosts to reach human populations, check out David Quammen’s book on zoonotic disease, Spillover. Published in 2012, the book explores a variety of pathogens lurking in environments all over the world.

Archaea, Bacteria, Counting Domains

In our very first post, we mentioned the origin of our institute’s full name. Carl R. Woese gained renown in the scientific community—although very little outside of it—through his data-driven redrawing of the entire tree of life. He did so by identifying the existence of an entirely unsuspected group of organisms that had been around, on, and even within us all along.

What is the tree of life, and what does it take to redraw it? The term was first brought into the biological lexicon by Charles Darwin, who used drawings of branching trees to express his proposed theory of evolution. Others before him had used trees to present information about living organisms on Earth, but he is recognized as the first to have done so, not as an aesthetic choice, but to represent true ancestral relationships among the different organisms via the tree’s pattern of branches.

As the idea of evolution took hold in the scientific community, so too did the tree diagram as a way to express the emergence of new forms of life. A near-contemporary of Darwin’s, German scientist Ernst Haeckel, developed the tree of life diagram into a model to express ideas about the relationships between all known forms of life. He based these hypothesized relationships on what scientists could observe at the time: the similarity between their physical characteristics.

Haeckel’s approach to the tree of life was bold and innovative for its time. And although there were many further developments in the field of phylogenetics, a term he coined that describes the study of evolutionary relationships, for over a century there were none that adequately addressed the organisms that pervade our actual living world: microbes.

Microbes defied a tree built on physical characteristics. They are tiny, and their structures tinier still. Similar traits in microbes have evolved over and over again, including among those that are not closely related at all. It takes a good microscope to really see them, and when you do, what you see may mislead you.

This brings us back to Carl Woese. One of his greatest insights was to look past the surface of single-celled organisms and classify them based on what was on the inside, and to use genomics to do it. Rather than comparing cellular structures, he compared gene sequences across many different organisms to discern patterns of evolution, focusing on microbes in particular. What he found took him, and the rest of the scientific world, by complete surprise.

At that time, the accepted tree of life placed all living things in one of five “kingdoms.” Woese was hoping to get a clearer idea of relationships within the most troublesome kingdom, Monera. For over a century, this group had been a junk drawer for single-celled life forms that no one knew how to group; in the classification Woese was working from, most monerans were called bacteria. The genomic data he collected defied this. In fact, some of the supposed bacteria were no more closely related to their nominal relatives than we are. Woese named this group of organisms Archaea, one of three “domains” in his revolutionary new tree of life (alongside Bacteria and Eukarya, the latter being the group to which plants, animals, and fungi now belong.)

Such a striking scientific claim demands striking evidence; to help amass it, Woese catalogued and compared genomic data from a particular group of archaeans called methanogens. These non-bacterial look-alikes are everywhere, if you know how to look; their quirky metabolism demands that they avoid oxygen and emit methane, which they do from the depths of swamps, the heat of deep-sea vents, and the gut of your friendly neighborhood cow. Their radically unbacteria-like genes not only helped confirm Archaea as a real group, their study continues to raise new questions about the tree of life. Thanks in part to methanogen biology, it has now been hypothesized that all multicellular life on Earth is not its own domain, but simply a strange archaeal side show. What else do methanogens have to teach us about evolution?

Evolution, Flip-flopping Food, Genomics

With a break room situated on the first floor of the lab building, Nayak’s group members were consistently joined by some cute friends for lunch: squirrels staring through the windows, begging for food. Against their better judgement, the group began bringing some seeds and nuts for the squirrels. In true scientific spirit, the lab members investigated the squirrels’ favorite snacks, offering them pairs of choices and observing their selections. It turned out to be almonds.

“Just by training them and giving them choices of things to eat, we saw that there is a clear preference that emerges very, very quickly,” Nayak said during her seminar. “Regardless of whether it’s a squirrel or methanogens, there is a substrate preference.”

Methanogens consume their food, referred to as a substrate, in the form of molecules that can be converted to methane, yielding energy in the process. One of the first chemical reactions in this process is performed by an enzyme called methyltransferase—MT1 for short. Like different locks require their matching keys, methanogens need different versions of MT1 that match each type of substrate they consume. To save energy, these organisms only produce the MT1s they currently need. Think of it this way: even if you like homemade pizza, you aren’t going to spend the time and energy preparing dough and sauce from scratch every night on the off chance you might want pizza tomorrow. You save your effort for a determined pizza time.

Research from Nayak’s group aims to understand how methanogens appropriately match their MT1 production to their predicted menu. How do methanogens sense what substrates are available and make sure they have the corresponding MT1s ready to go? How do they know when to call off production of MT1s not being used to save energy?

Nayak’s team studied this process in a methanogen called Methanosarcina acetivorans, looking at two different molecular substrates for making methane: trimethyamine and methanol. They found that M. acetivorans “prefers” methanol, and takes several days to begin growing again if switched to trimethylamine; if fed trimethylamine first, they take a day or two to switch to methanol. But what if they are asked to switch back and forth, over and over again? Can they become more flexible in accepting a new substrate?

After 200 days and 50 flip-flops between the two substrates, Nayak’s lab found that M. acetivorans had evolved, shifting smoothly back and forth between foods. Their secret strategy for doing so was revealed in their DNA sequences. Caught in an ever-shifting world, the microbes had decided to make pizza dough every night, just in case. Each strain they examined, through its own series of mutations, had stumbled onto a way to deregulate the production of metabolic enzymes, likely at an energetic cost, but one that was advantageous in the surprising environment the researchers had devised.

This is more than just an interesting story. The ubiquity of methanogens and their notable place on the tree of life form the substrate of a strong case for their continued study. They live in the extremes of our world, help to shape our climate, and occupy our guts. Not as fancy as pigeons or Galapagos finches, they are still a face of evolution, and have much to teach us about our own biology.

Parting thoughts

If this post left you wanting a deeper dive into the current tree of life, you might enjoy exploring it on this website that beautifully captures the diversity of life on Earth:

https://www.onezoom.org/

But if what you really crave is a fun puzzle, enjoy this daily guessing game that uses phylogeny to nudge you toward the identify of that day’s star animal: https://metazooa.com.

Perfusion: med. The process of passing through an organ or tissue

Medically, perfusion is defined as the passage of blood through tissue. Perfusion is the everyday labor of moving oxygen, nutrients, and myriad molecular signals around our bodies, keeping our cells alive. We become acutely aware of the importance of perfusion when blood flow is occluded, and we scramble to diagnose and treat.

One way of understanding life on Earth is as a temporary contradiction of entropy. Living things create order out of disorder, expending energy to hold entities together and prevent decay. To sustain life, this order must be contained, but also propagated. Nutrients and other resources are distributed, but adhere to defined channels. Tissues in the body develop, but stop at defined boundaries. Populations expand, but are constrained by what their environment can bear.

This year’s show looks at this push and pull of life’s requirements. In what different ways is energy distributed around a single cell, or blood around a body? How do organisms, from ants to bacteria to crops, form a community that can grow and spread? Science looks for the answers to these questions; the resulting art helps to make those answers more alluringly visible.

Perfusion: concr. That which has been poured over. rare.

Science is perfused by ideas, which are carried from person to person and keep us questioning, studying, and seeking more. This work moves out into the world to affect the institutions of society. In this context, what does healthy perfusion look like? When it is occluded, how can we work to restore it?

Our exhibit has become a regular part of the Champaign Urbana community, recurring every spring for the last 16 years. It would not have been possible without the thoughtful support of Doug and Janet Nelson from Bodyworks Associates, in partnership with the support of Dr. Gene Robinson. How did this partnership emerge? The story goes that while visiting the IGB one day, Doug Nelson was struck by the beauty of the scientific images he observed there. He encouraged Gene Robinson to find a way to move this esoteric form of art into the public view. Since then, three different artists have worked on the program, each exploring new ways to achieve this goal.

Even as the Art of Science program has evolved, its goal stays the same: it seeks to embody the motto “science unexpected” by freeing scientific imagery from the pages of academic journals and allowing the beauty of natural phenomena to emerge. Doing so provides a new avenue of engagement for those who find reading an article or attending a lecture to be intimidating. As children, most of us did not ask whether we were smart enough to understand why blood is red, how flowers know when to bloom, whether insects dream. We just asked and reached for as much understanding as we could. We hope our art reawakens some of that unapologetic curiosity.

In its current form, Art of Science focuses on the conversations with scientists about their work. Each piece and series of pieces is an expression of these conversations, which sometimes recapture the scientists’ original inspiration for their research: curiosity-driven questions, experientially motivated societal goals. The artistic work also skips through history, taking inspiration from other great observational artists and scientists. The connecting through-line of each show is a passion for the study of life on earth.

Parting thoughts

Come visit the Opening Friday May 1st from 4-8 pm at Analog Wine Bar (129 N Race St, Urbana, IL 61801). The show will be open through the month of May and open during Analog’s open hours. If it’s not possible for you to see it in person, keep an eye out for future Art of Science Unfolded posts to see some of the works and the thought behind them!

This year’s Earth Day theme is “Our Power, Our Planet.” Part of our power is our ever-growing knowledge of the life around us, which can give us new ways to appreciate and protect it. Let’s dive into a field of tulips.

Viral Beauty

Richly patterned with stripes, streaks, feathers, and flames, “broken” tulips are some of the most coveted tulip varieties. Like the modern labubu craze of the 2020s, 17th century Dutch people went absolutely crazy over rare tulips, especially the variegated or broken varieties. Collecting rare tulips was a form of conspicuous consumption, signifying class and wealth. Broken tulip varieties like Zomerschoon, Admiraal, Viceroy, and the legendary Semper Augustus sold for thousands of dollars. Dubbed Tulipomania, this short-lived floral frenzy from 1634 to 1637 is often cited as a classic example of the first recorded financial bubble. In a sense, tulips were the first NFTs. The legacy of Tulipomania lives on through the numerous 17th century Dutch floral paintings, tulip festivals, and even poetry.

“The Painterly Pathology of Potyviruses”

–Judith A. Lesnaw and Said A. Ghabrial

Tulip breaking virus (TBV) or tulip mosaic virus is the cause of the flame or striping patterns in tulip petals. Tulip petals get their coloration from plant pigments called anthocyanins. TBV is transmitted to tulips by aphids, the small and prolific plant pests that live on plant sap; once introduced, the virus stops the formation of the anthocyanins in the affected regions of the petals.

The virus hijacks the tulip’s cellular machinery directing energy and resources away from pigment production in the petals and toward viral replication. Thus, the primary color of the tulip petals remains in the pigmented uninfected regions, and the infected unpigmented areas of the petal appear white or yellow. While this sounds simple in premise, much is still unknown about how this gives tulips their striped patterns. Why does a striped pattern form, rather than just random patches of pigment missing from the petals? As researchers continue to investigate this 300 year mystery, one team from the University of Alberta recently used mathematical modeling to explain the patterns’ formations in broken tulips as their petals grow.

Since they are closely related, both lilies and tulips can be infected by TBV and other potyviruses like tulip top-breaking virus, tulip band-breaking virus, Rembrandt tulip-breaking virus and lily mottle virus. All of these viruses can cause infections that also result in color breaking.

Although tulip breaking is caused by a virus, the infection does not actually kill the tulips. It is actually advantageous to the virus to infect the host organism without killing it so that it may continue to replicate and spread. Although TBV has been called a “benevolent virus”, virally infected tulips are no longer available commercially because of the unpredictability of color patterns and reduced resilience of infected plants.

Luckily, dedicated tulip breeders have figured out how to create broken or variegated tulips without viral infection through traditional plant hybridization. Often called Rembrandt Tulips, these flowers are a disease-free modern tulip variety with stable striping or variegation that can be passed to their offspring. TBV and other potyviruses that affect tulips have not been eradicated and viral symptoms can be easily confused with variegation produced through plant hybridization.

Parting Thoughts

Ever wonder why Earth Day is April 22? The environmental movement was mostly student-led. Senator Gaylord Nelson and youth activist Denis Hayes chose April 22 because it lies in between spring break and final exams to maximize student participation.

Getting back to tulips, some are bred to have extra sets of chromosomes. Typically tulips have two sets of chromosomes making them diploid. Darwin tulips have three (triploid) or more sets of chromosomes and are coveted cultivars because of their large flowers, cold tolerance, and sturdy stems. As people continue to seek out the most interesting tulips for their gardens, like Darwin tulips, we are reminded of a (maybe not true) story from the 17th century. Rumor has it that during Tulipomania, a Dutch sailor mistook a rare and expensive tulip bulb (worth approximately 3,000 florins, or about £280) for an onion and ate it, leading him to be charged with a felony and imprisoned. While this is likely a fictional tale, it highlights how humans have long appreciated our Earth’s bounty: both its beautiful flowers and nutritious vegetation.

To learn more about Tulipomania, check out: Tulipmania: A Garden Historian’s Perspective | Faculty of History

Obviously, what we have in mind is a story of nutrition, amino acids, and microbes. And graduate students, of course. Let’s learn more about how nutrients flow through our bodies, and our ecosystems.

We are what we eat?

Everyone who is reading this is an auxotroph. This is not an old-timey insult; it is a name for an organism that is missing the capability to make one or more essential nutrients that it needs to grow and thrive. Of the amino acids that make up our proteins, there are nine that we cannot make for ourselves. We have to get them from the food we eat, which is one reason why including plant or animal proteins in our diet is important.

The identification of these nine amino acids was first made by Professor of Physiological Chemistry William Rose, a faculty member at the University of Illinois from 1922 until his retirement in 1955. Rose turned a childhood interest in chemistry into a lifelong career understanding how what we eat keeps our body working. In a long series of careful experiments, Rose found that there were certain amino acids that animals could not do without—even with adequate calories, they would lose weight if fed a diet including all the amino acids except one of the ones he eventually dubbed “essential.” When the animals were then fed the missing amino acid, they quickly and fully recovered their weight.

Rose then undertook thoughtfully constructed experiments to see if the same amino acids might be essential in the diet of humans. He recruited a cohort of graduate students willing to temporarily consume an unappetizing diet of “corn starch, sucrose, butter fat from which the protein had been removed, corn oil, inorganic salts, the known vitamins, and mixtures of highly purified amino acids . . . a large brown candy containing a concentrated liver extract as a possible source of unknown vitamins, sweetened with sugar and flavored with peppermint oil, which provided a never-to-be-forgotten taste.”

Thanks to the dedicated participation of these students and his own data collection and analysis, Rose was able to show that healthy human adults could tolerate the diet even when it lacked a particular amino acid for the duration of the experiment, but for each of the diets lacking one of the nine essential amino acids, their nitrogen metabolism shifted measurably until a regular diet resumed—a signal that their body was missing a needed input. This work and the experiments that followed informed our ability to describe healthy diets and design effective nutritional supplements.

A meeting of the metabolisms

When we consider our reliance on our diet to provide what we need, organisms like the common bread mold, Neurospora, put us to shame. This fungus, first documented turning delicious French bread orange and fuzzy in 1843, outcompetes Rose’s graduate students in more than culinary opportunities. Neurospora is not an auxotroph; from a diet of inorganic substances, it can synthesize any and every amino acid it needs. That is, it could until George Beadle and Edward Tatum showed up.

Beadle and Tatum, geneticists whose work together at Stanford University in the 1940s eventually won them a Nobel Prize, didn’t set out to ruin Neurospora’s baguette-eating party (although they did.) They were trying to study how genes related to physical traits. By exposing the bread mold to x-rays, they induced random mutations. Among the mutant strains of mold, they found a few that could still live on a “complete” medium—a slurry of nutrients including every amino acid—but could no longer survive on a “minimal” medium that provided inorganic components only.

The mutant microbes had become auxotrophs, just like Rose’s subjects (and the rest of us.) By tying a change in a gene to a change in the mold’s ability to perform a particular metabolic reaction, Beadle and Tatum set the stage for us to understand the genetic code and the functions of genes more generally. They also invented the term “auxotroph.” But this term referred to microbial auxotrophs primarily as products of the laboratory. Can such a tiny organism, one that can’t hunt and gather food as animals can, afford to be so dependent on the diet its environment has to offer?

It turns out, yes. Beadle and Tatum created many microbial auxotrophs, but they weren’t the first. Nature has been producing them all along, and in fact, most microbes are auxotrophs of one kind or another. This is a reminder that most often, microbes don’t go it alone—they form communities and exchange resources to get what they need. In fact, a recent study from IGB researcher and bioengineering professor Sergei Maslov and several collaborators showed how a community composed of multiple auxotrophs can be more stable in the face of environmental fluctuations. In the face of uncertainty, they are providing each other with a safety net, producing and sharing what others might need and getting what they need in exchange. Maybe we are not so different.

Parting thoughts

Jurassic Park, both the original book and the later movie, clearly made their success through charismatic characters and a captivating plot rather than full scientific accuracy. A less-remembered plot point is that the dinosaurs could supposedly be controlled by their dependency on lysine in their diet.

Ray Arnold: The lysine contingency is intended to prevent the spread of the animals in case they ever get off the island. Dr. Wu inserted a gene that makes a single faulty enzyme in protein metabolism. The animals can’t manufacture the amino acid lysine. Unless they’re continually supplied with lysine by us, they’ll slip into a coma and die.

Dr. Ellie Sattler: How could we cut off the lysine?

To no one’s surprise, Dr. Sattler was asking the right question. Lysine is an essential amino acid for all vertebrate animals on Earth, but we get by exactly the way the dinosaurs in the park could have and apparently did: by eating plants, which produce lysine, or eating an animal that ate a plant. We aren’t always as collaborative as microbes, but life finds a way.

In school, we learn the names of historical scientists—Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Alexander Flemming, and Charles Darwin, to name a few—whose scientific impact is still evident. Today, modern scientists are still pushing the boundaries of research, but the typical structure of a research team looks quite different now. What once was perceived as an endeavor of lone scientists has transformed into a large, collaborative landscape. At its foundation are hundreds of thousands of graduate students who drive research and innovation.

Like campuses across the country, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spent the last few days celebrating Graduate Student Appreciation Week. In honor of that annual time of recognition, we are highlighting the work of graduate students, whose contributions to scientific research often go unseen, in today’s post.

What does it mean to be a graduate student?

You may be wondering why graduate students need an appreciation week; aren’t they just students paying tuition and earning their degree? In some ways, yes. Upon graduation, these students receive their master’s or doctoral diploma. But for most graduate students in scientific fields, the label “student” doesn’t fully capture the nature of their role in research. As a graduate student, it can be a bit hard to explain to friends and family how you are still in school after five years, haven’t taken a class in three, and still don’t have a graduation date.

Graduate students are a cornerstone of academic institutions, comprising a majority of the research labor at universities across the world. Many, if not all, scientific discoveries and advancements made in the past fifty years are thanks in no small part to them.

This is due to how the structure of scientific research has changed over the years. Historically, scientific training resembled a master-apprentice model, in which a trainee works closely with their mentor through hands-on approaches to gain the knowledge and skills. In the modern structure, many prominent scientists eventually leave behind their hands-on practice after training, shifting their focus to leading teams that work within their particular area of expertise. In this capacity, these scientists—often professors at universities—tend to function as thought-leaders and project managers, while graduate students and other research scientists work in the lab and train younger members in hands-on skills.

As a result of this structure, the variety of tasks that graduate students may be responsible for has expanded: asking research questions, running technical experiments, analyzing data, doing chores to maintain the lab space, and mentoring younger students, among others. On top of this, graduate students often contribute to the larger teaching structure of the university, functioning as instructors who run undergraduate classes and lab courses. In one semester, a graduate student can be taking classes and teaching an undergraduate course, while also working full time on their thesis research.

The work of graduate students often goes unseen, hidden behind the names of the accomplished scientists they are working with. But these students are a driving force of innovation. One example of this type of hidden impact is the work of Carol Greider, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who made an important discovery when she was a graduate student in 1984.

From research nobody to the Nobel Prize

In 2009, Carol Greider won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack Szostak, for the discovery of telomerase. This enzyme, made of protein and RNA, adds pieces of repeating DNA sequence to the ends of chromosomes to preserve them from breaking down over time. These ends are called telomeres, which are critical to protect the ends of chromosomes from losing important genetic code as cells duplicate and bodies age.

Carol Greider earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987, where she worked in Professor Elizabeth Blackburn’s research group. In her Nobel Prize biographical, Greider shares her journey to receiving the prize. This piece lends an inside view into her experience as a graduate student researcher at the time of telomerase’s discovery.

Prior to Greider’s arrival at Berkeley, Blackburn’s group had already reported the structure of the telomeres capping the ends of DNA, like plastic aglets on ends of shoelaces. But they still didn’t know how telomeres maintained their length during the DNA replication. Based on this process works, they would expect the telomeres to shorten over time, as this is the whole reason they are there to begin with—to prevent the actual genes from being damaged. Greider took this research question on when she joined Blackburn’s group; she searched for this answer in Tetrahymena, a single-celled organism. This “pond scum” has a large number of telomeres which made it a great place to start looking for a hypothetical enzyme that could add extra length. After laboring away in the lab for nine months, she found the first evidence of an enzyme, soon named telomerase, on Christmas Day in 1984.

Growing up as the daughter of two academics, Greider had never expected or planned to be a scientist. She struggled in school, having to find creative ways to overcome learning difficulties associated with dyslexia. But like many accomplished scientists before her, Greider followed her curiosities; a high school interest in biology, gained from an enthusiastic teacher, led her through numerous undergraduate research labs in different scientific fields, and then eventually to her telomere research in Blackburn’s group. By the time she was 23, Greider discovered telomerase, the breakthrough that would earn her the Nobel Prize 25 years later. Maybe more importantly, the discovery helped build the groundwork for important medical research into cancer and aging. Since graduate school, Greider has continued her research in this field, as her story continues to highlight the vital role of graduate students in shaping the scientific knowledge of our world.

Parting thoughts

Here at the IGB, our research institute wouldn’t be what it is today without graduate students. You can learn about some of their stories in these past IGB profiles:

• Han Keun Lee

• Umnia Doha

• Jeff Chen

• Génesis Ríos-Adorno

• Erinn Dady

• Marya Ornelas

Bizarre beetle hydrates with nocturnal headstands

In the fall of 1975, two biologists, Mary K. Seely and William J. Hamilton III, camped in the Namib desert to stalk a solution to a quiet mystery: why do some toktokkie beetles come out at night and stand on their heads in the dunes?

Seely and Hamilton watched each night as the beetles came out from their dens in the desert sand to stand on the crest of a dune, stretching their legs so that they accomplished a beetle version of a handstand. As they assumed this posture, a nighttime fog would roll in, and tiny drops of water would collect on the beetles’ waxy wings and roll down toward their heads.

The scientists suspected that the beetles were capitalizing on this gift of moisture in what is one of the driest regions of the world. But they were stunned by the scale of what these small insects were achieving. And a simple scale was the key to this discovery: by tagging the beetles with tiny number plates and weighing them before and after their midnight excursions, Seely and Hamilton confirmed that the beetles were drinking the water that condensed on their backs, catching it as it rolled down their grooved wings to their mouths. Some beetles drank as much as 34% of their own starting weight in water in a single night, storing it in an isolated cavity within their bodies to avoid diluting their body fluids too much.

The significance of this accomplishment and a similar behavior by related beetles were calmly reported in twin publications in Science and Nature the following year: “Observations of fog trapping have not been reported previously for any animal other than man.”

This boy bat has been mammary maxxing

The 1994 scientific correspondence to Nature from a team of biologists led by Charles Francis began in peculiarly suited style of the time:

“SIR- Although male lactation is physiologically possible, it is isolated and rare. It has been observed in domesticated mammals and in humans, but it has not been reported in wild, free-ranging species. Here we report lactation by males in a population of Dayak fruit bats . . . in the Krau Game Reserve, Pahang, Malaysia.”

Francis and his colleagues had set up a simple mist net to catch and examine local bat species. They were, if we may so put it, mystified to discover that each of the ten mature male bats they captured had fully developed mammary glands. The glands were producing milk, and tissue samples confirmed that this capacity for lactation was occurring in bats with fully functional male gonads. This bat is evasive and challenging to study; subsequent years have not yielded an answer about how often fathers may nurse their young or the evolutionary and environmental factors that have enabled male lactation.

Pooping parrotfish build beaches by crunching up coral

Colorful parrotfish populate the ocean waters of the Indo-Pacific, living around coral reefs and rocky coastal regions. Their rainbow appearance and vegetarian natures feel contradictory to the source of their name: a beak-like mouth filled with an alarming number of knobby teeth. As if these weren’t enough, their throat is filled with another set of pharyngeal teeth just behind their powerful jaws.

Why so many teeth? In 1996, marine biologist David Bellwood already knew the previous findings of parrotfish natural history: they feed on algae and microbial growths on rocks and coral, scraping and sometimes crunching the mineral substrates beneath them to extract as much flora as possible. What he documented in a series of dives in the Great Barrier Reef is the staggering volume of their coral consumption, and the resulting contributions to the marine environment. A humphead parrotfish can convert larger coral fragments and fresh bites of coral into as much as 1000 lbs of sand per year. That sand is carried away from the reef to wash up on island beaches. As we look out on rainy April weather, we can all imagine relaxing in the sun on the output of these industrious fish.

Parting thoughts

Sometimes we really shouldn’t believe what we think we see; or at least, we need to remember the ways that how we see something might contain bias. Diving deeper into Earth’s ocean waters, we find a reminder of this in the much-maligned blobfish.

Since their discovery in 2003 in a deep-sea species survey, blobfish have quickly built a reputation for charismatic hideousness. The subject of many an internet joke, they are actually fundamentally misunderstood. As we drag them up from the high-pressure depths to which they are exquisitely adapted, their fine-tuned tissues lose the context for their function. More simply put, when not under the high pressure of the deep sea, they simultaneously collapse and explode. In our effort to understand them, we accidentally change them into something else altogether. We must swim or scroll further to see them as they really are.

The Core Facilities group at the IGB helps make this type of scientific exploration and subsequent experimentation possible. They maintain a fleet of microscopes and other equipment that no one laboratory group could house on their own. The value of the Core team’s contributions were especially visible in a plant science study published last December, the first to use a microscope to watch the microscopic pores on a leaf surface open and close while documenting its real-time changes in carbon dioxide intake.

This research capability will help scientists understand how to help crop plants tolerate drought and remain productive under stress. Plant biology professor Andrew Leakey, who led the study, attributed a large part of its technological innovation to his laboratory’s close collaboration the Core Facilities, particularly its director, Glenn Fried. Fried’s dedication to creatively adapting research methods, particularly imaging methods, to the needs of each new project, is a guiding principle for Core Facilities work.

“The most important thing to know is that we’re very happy to help people do special projects,” Fried said. “Core Facilities is not just a list of instruments that we currently have . . . if you want a specific kind of imaging data, we’ll figure it out.”

Under Fried’s leadership, the Core Facilities has grown from its establishment with the opening of the IGB in 2007 to include 18 different microscopes, including a Minflux setup for super-resolution microscopy; a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer for detailed chemical analyses; and infrastructure for customizable sample preparation and image analysis. Emerging technologies have been reflected in new offered services, including 3D printing and upgrades of existing equipment.

The Core Facilities’ growth over time is necessary to keep pace with the mainstream research needs of a large and busy research institute, especially as part of Illinois’ active and collaborative campus environment.

“We had 130 roughly new people come to the Core this last year, and most of them were looking for support and access using established and standard microscopy techniques,” Fried said. “We can help them by providing access to tools and training or tools we have, microscopes we have.”

But each year also brings a project or two with more specialized imaging or analytical needs, and Fried’s group goes above and beyond to find ways to support them. Over the years, the Core Facilities team has pushed the boundaries of what their microscopes can do, innovating new sample preparation methods, adapting microscope constructions and settings, and procuring new equipment to create new pathways for discovery. The group has contributed to publications on the imaged 3D structure of an intact heart, the surface details of ancient pollen grains, and the fluid dynamics within a flow cell made out of real rock.

“In some cases, we don’t have the tools we need to do the project,” Fried said. “In that case, we started looking at ways to acquire the tools. Sometimes that means we need to buy a new microscope. Sometimes it means we need to build a microscope. Sometimes it means that we need to add on to our microscope. We will work with any of those options, depending on which we think is the most helpful.”

The most recent such effort, the development with Leakey’s research group of the “Stomata In-Sight” system, showcases the Core Facilities’ strengths. For the system to work, the team had to find a way to implement real-time microscopy of the movements of living cells on the surface of a leaf, in an enclosed chamber that also housed sensors able to detect tiny changes in ambient carbon dioxide and water vapor.

“We put a long working distance objective on the microscope and then we built a stage adaptor; [we] drew up plans and took them to the shop and made support systems so that the stage would support” the detectors needed, Fried said, describing how Core Facilities staff and lab members worked together. “it’s a pretty big deal because that paper represents a whole new way to measure things that have never been measured before. Andrew Leakey has positioned himself as the leader in observing stomata open and close. No one else does that, and that’s pretty special.”

At the end of the day, what drives the Core Facilities team is the pursuit of better and broader ranging science through a flexible approach to research methods.

“I try to build a culture in the Core that when someone comes in and says, ‘we have a problem,’ we’ll say, ‘we’ll help you.’” Fried said. “And then we ask what the problem is.”

Cinderellas vs. Statistics

Each year, fans of basketball and bragging rights alike are confronted with a set of daunting decisions: 63 blank spaces, with each corresponding to the winner of each game in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. As college athletes try to win their way to a national championship, everyone else can shoot their shot at creating the elusive perfect bracket—or at least come the closest.

The total number of possible March Madness brackets, 9.2 quintillion, is a bit hard to comprehend. To put this in perspective, 9.2 quintillion seconds make up 292 billion years, over 20 times longer than the approximate age of the universe. Fortunately, the odds of picking a successful bracket get a lot better with a good strategy and some prior knowledge of basketball. Better is relative: these assists bring us to a whopping 1 in 120 billion chance of perfection.

In 2026, expert opinions, advanced prediction algorithms, and in-depth “bracketology” breakdowns make it easier than ever to make informed March Madness decisions. Beyond looking at national rankings and tournament seeding (1 to 16 in each quadrant), online bracket selection platforms also provide myriad comparative statistics for each matchup. But extra knowledge and data still don’t prevent Cinderella teams popping up to bust some brackets—like the historic Elite 8 run of St. Peter’s University’s unranked, 15-seeded team in 2022—that may end up benefiting the bracket of a coworker who made their selections based on cutest team mascots.

Whether guided by data or gut instinct, there are many strategies for bracket selection, with varying levels of success from year to year. Let's look at some examples:

• Prioritizing ranking: This conservative approach is also one of the most straightforward; just pick the better team on paper. Rankings are a great place to start making a bracket because they provide a more holistic view of a team than one metric could. In a perfect world, everything points to the higher-ranked teams winning. In reality, 2025 was one of the few years in recent memory that the four best teams on paper made it to the semifinals. Some examples of uncertain factors that could undermine this approach include the mental game associated with the high-pressure environment of March Madness, unexpected injuries to star players, or the partially subjective, sometimes inaccurate nature of rankings.

• Follow the stats that speak to you: What makes a team good or bad? What makes a team successful in the tournament? When given countless stats, data, and opinions, which ones are most important to consider? Even in sports media, experts don’t always agree with each other. Maybe one person prioritizes a team who played stronger teams during the regular season, rather than just considering win to loss ratio. But when looking at wins and losses, should the overall record be valued, or are the last 10 games leading up to the tournament a better indicator late in the season? Are there certain metrics that are more valuable in tournament play than regular season? Whether a human or machine learning algorithm, there are many ways to interpret the data, and when there are so many confounding factors, it is difficult to identify which to hedge your bets on.

• Embrace the madness: Choose your favorite team to win it all. Take 10 minutes to throw a bracket together based on vibes or gut-instinct. In the 2018 tournament, it seemed like all the teams wearing blue were winning. When the uncertainty is high and the upsets are flowing, having some fun and embracing the random can sometimes help your bracket rise to the top.

Because of the single-elimination nature of the tournament, the most carefully constructed bracket is vulnerable to upsets. Much has been written from the perspective of March Madness about why predictive statistics struggle with this situation, in which a great deal of information is known about a system but a chance event substantially alters the outcome. But what can these ideas teach us about statistics in science, and our feelings about scientific predictions?

Science vs. Serendipity

A core goal of science is not only to explain the world around us, but to empower us to make predictions about it. The more we learn about how a plant grows or how a disease progresses, the more we hope to be able to foresee—and then to facilitate or forestall—that process. In this goal we are both helped and hindered by the powerful but biased predictive powers of our own brains. We gather information and are quick to spot certain types of patterns, but are swayed by factors like differences of scale or the involvement of emotion. These biases in our intuition can be helpful when escaping a predator; they are less suited for drawing conclusions from systematically collected data.

For help with that task, we turn to statistics. This branch of math was developed to help us organize information that we gather and draw conclusions from it in an objective way. It helps distinguish randomness from patterns, and those patterns can enable us to make predictions.

Statistics typically helps us to draw general conclusions about a group or a population, in situations where we can’t gather information for every entity within the group. Imagine we wanted to know whether doing 20 jumping jacks every morning leads to a lower resting heart rate. If we simply find one person who does jumping jacks and another who does not, we can’t be sure whether differences in their heart rate are due to calisthenic habit or other chance factors. But as we look at more and more jumping and non-jumping individuals, any pattern that might truly be caused by the exercise of interest should get stronger, not weaker.

This power (that’s actually what it’s called!) of statistics is also linked to what can make its conclusions feel unsatisfying. When we read up on a medical condition, view the weather forecast, or study a basketball team’s ranking, we are taking in a general conclusion based on the average of many patient outcomes, past weather events, or games throughout a season. These conclusions can give us odds, but we don’t usually experience our lives in odds. What we remember is what actually happens to us, the individual. Severe weather happened in our town, or it didn’t. The team we follow won in the Round of 16, or they lost.

In March Madness, the temptation to beat the odds keeps pulling fans back in for another try. There is a peculiar attraction to a longshot, and most people love the kind of underdog story that Cinderellas provide. If we built a tournament like a scientific study, we would ask teams to play each other over and over until their true skill levels drowned out fickle chance, and we could write perfect brackets; a version of the NCAA tournament with higher statistical power would more closely resemble the NBA and WBA playoffs, which require a team to win 4 out of 7 games in a match up. But in the end, it isn’t science—it’s sports. And the tournament wouldn’t be “March Madness” without the promise and thrill of uncertainty.

Parting thoughts

While we aim to remain unbiased and defer to statistics in our scientific endeavors, we are not immune from the pull of sports fandom. Here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, we will be cheering on the Fighting Illini tonight in their first game! ILL!

If you are a basketball fan and missed your chance at the men’s tournament, there’s still time to make your picks before the women’s tournament starts tomorrow. If you, like a few others on our team, don’t know or care much about basketball, you can read up on the annual March Mammal Madness! It’s too late to submit a bracket for this year, but you can still enjoy the results and learn a lot about our close animal relatives: https://libguides.asu.edu/MarchMammalMadness.