News
Jul 07, 2021
Fighting COVID with COVID
What if the COVID-19 virus could be used against itself? Researchers at Penn State have designed a proof-of-concept therapeutic that may be able to do just that. The team designed a synthetic defective SARS-CoV-2 virus that is innocuous but interferes with the real virus’ growth, potentially causing the extinction of both the disease-causing virus and the synthetic virus.
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Jul 01, 2021
Scientists resurrect 'forgotten' genus of algae living in marine animals
In the late 1800s, scientists were stumped by the “yellow cells” they were observing within the tissues of certain temperate marine animals, including sea anemones, corals, and jellyfish. Were these cells part of the animal or separate organisms? If separate, were they parasites, or did they confer a benefit to the host?
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Jul 01, 2021
National Institutes of Health funds neural engineering graduate training program
Penn State has a new cross-disciplinary program to train graduate students interested in the complex landscape of the human brain, supported by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
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Jul 01, 2021
How does a regulatory protein know where to bind to modulate insulin production?
Some proteins in the body ensure that genes are turned on and off at the correct times. Understanding where speckle-type POZ protein (SPOP) binds may help researchers predict what predisposes individuals to develop diabetes and clarify how SPOP regulates other important proteins. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Penn State and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital imaged the proteins and determined just how this important interaction occurs.
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Jun 30, 2021
Claude dePamphilis named Huck Chair in Plant Biology and Evolutionary Genomics
Claude dePamphilis, Penn State Professor of Biology, has been named the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Distinguished Chair in Plant Biology and Evolutionary Genomics by the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
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Jun 29, 2021
International team develops predictive tool to help mitigate COVID-19 in Africa
The virus that gives rise to COVID-19 is the third coronavirus to threaten humanity in the past two decades. It also happens to move more efficiently from person to person than either SARS or MERS did. An international collaboration led by Penn State developed a surveillance modeling tool that provides a weekly projection of expected COVID-19 cases in all African countries, based on publicly available information.
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Jun 29, 2021
David Hughes named Chair in Global Food Security
David Hughes, professor of entomology and biology in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences and creator of PlantVillage, a knowledge platform that helps farmers combat pests and adapt to climate change, has been named the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security in the University’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.
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Jun 28, 2021
Weird warbler reveals genetics of its mismatched colors
An incredibly rare hybrid warbler with mismatched color patterns has allowed researchers to disentangle the genetic drivers of two traits that usually come as a package deal — the black face mask and the black throat patch in blue-winged and golden-winged warblers.
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Jun 23, 2021
Behavior limits COVID-19 spread between University and community
When universities across the U.S. opted to return students to campus for in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic in the fall of 2020, surrounding communities were understandably concerned that COVID-19 infections rates would significantly increase. In response, several Penn State researchers formed the Centre County COVID-19 Data 4 Action Project (D4A) to conduct anonymous surveys and biological testing for nonstudent residents and Penn State students to document the social and economic impacts of the pandemic in one community.
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Jun 22, 2021
Newly sequenced genome of extinct giant lemur sheds light on animal's biology
Using an unusually well-preserved subfossil jawbone, a team of researchers — led by Penn State and with a multi-national team of collaborators including scientists from the Université d’Antananarivo in Madagascar — has sequenced for the first time the nuclear genome of the koala lemur (Megaladapis edwardsi), one of the largest of the 17 or so giant lemur species that went extinct on the island of Madagascar between about 500 and 2,000 years ago.
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