Danielle Pycior

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#IAmScience Mannie Liscum

December 6, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: biology

For Mannie Liscum, thinking is a privilege, and his job gives him the chance to be fascinated by human’s capacity to conceptualize and learn new things.

“It’s my goal to use as much of the stuff between my ears as I can while I’m here,” said the Bond LSC primary investigator. “And that’s what drives a lot of people into science.”

Along with that internal tick to learn, he’s inspired by the scientific pursuit to better understand the world. He said it’s easy to see things and from one mindset, but in reality, it’s always more complicated, and his young experiences taught him that.

“As you learn more and mature more, in terms of knowledge, you become more and more open all the time and you become less and less closed off and afraid of change and things that you aren’t familiar with,” he said.

Travel is an important part of advancing this understanding, particularly through trips that make him think more deeply about important topics.

A few years ago, he went to a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, and took the opportunity to travel to Moscow and Smolensk, along with Auschwitz. Another trip that deeply affected him was a civil rights tour throughout the southern U.S. states.

“I thought I was pretty open-mind, but I realized I still had a lot to learn and how much courage and strength minority populations in this country have and have had,” he said. “It’s an experience everyone should have. As a non-Jew, non-persecuted person, I can only understand those situations so much until I stand on those grounds.”

Growing up on a farm in upstate New York, he always thought the vet that came to look at the cows had the coolest job. He started his undergrad at State University of New York at Plattsburgh looking into veterinary medicine, but his school didn’t have it, so he tackled pre-med. After pushing through various science courses, he finally found his passion during one particular semester while he and 14 other students lived on-site at a research institute learning anything “from microscopy to animal cell culture, plant tissue culture, molecular biology, immunology to virology.”

He said they lived and breathed science during that semester, and he absolutely loved it. This led him down a path of plant biology research. Though he didn’t get the best grades or the best GRE score, he was determined to forge his own path. He saw rejections and received unkind words, but it taught him that students are human beings who deserve respect, even if they aren’t right for a certain program.

“I love being able to couple an idea with evidence to then drive forward a new idea,” he said.

Liscum eventually ended up at Ohio State University for his graduate degree after a professor there advocated for him to be in the program.

“I finished my Ph.D. in four years and I published eight publications when I was a graduate student,” he said. “So, I had a successful graduate career. It was different than exams and classes, and for me, it was an experience I can thrive in, whereas the classroom experience was not my strength, which again, gives me a different perspective when I’m trying to teach.”

After his graduate degree, he went onto his postdoctoral position at Stanford, and before he had finished that program received a job offer at MU. That was 24 years ago, and since that time, he said he’s had the privilege of working with phenomenal students and colleagues and has grown to love Columbia.

His thirst for knowledge doesn’t only exist in the scientific framework. Liscum is interested in a variety of topics and seeks knowledge and perspective through literature. This year, he’s already read 44 books in pursuit of his goal of 52, one book a week. He said he still struggles with English, as he did growing up, but the more he pushes through the better he gets at it. That’s a philosophy he’s often lived by.

Amid his search for knowledge, Liscum enjoys politics, history, cooking, films, traveling and abnormal art.

Every October for the last 15 years, Mannie Liscum spends hours each night carving pumpkins. These aren’t your regular small, happy face pumpkins though. He carves an astonishingly intricate pumpkin each day of the month. What began as portraits of his kids in pumpkin form, turned into a life-long, stress-relieving hobby.

In the past quarter-century, he’s seen Columbia grow by 25,000 people, bring in new restaurants and events, and expand its eclectic vibe. He also loves its position in the world, seeing it as a great location to travel across the country and globe. His kids are in Colorado and Georgia, which allows him to drive to visit them both.

At the end of the day, Liscum is driven by connection – to people, to his community, to his research and his opportunity to keep on learning.

“The more we engage, the better we become as a species,” he said. “That’s how I see life.”

#IAmScience Jordyn Lucas

November 29, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: biochemistry

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

Fourteen billion years ago, the universe began expanding. Four billion years ago, the earth formed. Four million years ago, humans began to roam the Earth. Four years ago, Jordyn Lucas began her graduate degree studying the origins of life in the lab of Donald Burke at Bond LSC.

“We have this really cool grant from NASA that I’m working on,” she said. “We’re working with RNA to see if it would have been a good progenitor molecule for life, and testing the bounds of what it can do on its own.”

Her current research explores a topic that remains a mystery.

“No one else knows the answer,” she said. “So, when I find that answer, I’m the first one to know, which is really exciting to me.”

Lucas finds it fascinating how skills learned in a career can parallel into life. Her problem solving, building relationships with other scientists, being a part of a team, seeking criticism and overcoming failure have helped her become who she is. She said Burke’s diverse lab has also helped her gain new perspectives about research and about the world in general.

“A lot of scientists come at things one-dimensionally because that’s how they think, but when you’re forced to constantly interact with someone who’s coming at it from a different dimension, it helps you become multidimensional in your thinking,” Lucas said.

One of the biggest lessons Lucas has learned throughout her career so far is that criticism is a useful and healthy part of growth. It wasn’t always easy for her, especially in the beginning, but with time she came to realize that using criticism to her advantage enhanced her abilities.

“Actually, I seek it out because criticism makes you a better person, a better scientist, a better friend, and I think that a lot of people avoid criticism, but in this field, you have to cherish it,” she said. “This is a tough field and you want to get as much criticism as possible to make your research the best it can be.”

As a fourth-year biochemistry graduate student in the Burke lab, she focuses on how life evolved on Earth or could potentially evolve on other planets. Her field houses prebiotic chemists, geologists, geo biochemists, biologists and atmospheric scientists to name a few. She respects that diversity because there will always be a new answer to seek.

Though she originally went for biomedical engineering because of her interest in physics and chemistry, she realized she enjoyed science-heavy courses over math-heavy ones. By sophomore year at Purdue University, she had an internship in a microbiology industry lab and fell in love with research, eventually earning her undergraduate degree in biochemistry.

“I am always a person that wants to know why and science is a great field for that,” she said. “Not only do we kind of celebrate asking why, but it’s basically what the field is founded on – we’re always trying to figure out the next thing.”

In the past year, Lucas found a passion for communicating science to nonscientists to help them learn and find their own interest and curiosity. From Science on Wheels to meeting with a local rotary club to being on the Inside Mizzou podcast, Lucas has taken every opportunity to help people to learn. She said it’s important to build a healthier relationship with the non-scientific community.

She’s also really involved in the biochemistry graduate student organization and generally enjoys interacting with people.

“When I’m really having trouble with something I’ll bring it to a lab meeting and say, you know, guys, what do you think about this? Every single person has a great idea or thinks of a different control to use or a different approach to solve my problem,” she said.

Though her lab mates intellectually support her, she has also built lasting friendships here at MU. In October she ran a half marathon and trained for six months with a coworker. She also raved about Bond LSC, saying the open space and light allow researchers to make friends across labs and helps force them out of their spaces when they’re struggling with their research.

For Lucas, a great weekend entails being cozied up with a good book. She also loves to travel. Among traveling across the country for various conferences, she reminisced on a three-week trip to South Korea. Like most of her favorite things, she enjoys what challenges her to think differently.

She is excited about the future and its endless possibilities. Though she’s considering working at NASA or The Earth Life Science Institute in Japan, she’s staying open-minded.

#IAmScience Maddy Creach

November 8, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: Walter Gassmann

“Science is concrete, but it isn’t rigid. Research is constantly new and fresh.”

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

For Maddy Creach, a scientific career was always the end goal, and television and books have played a part in that inspiration.

When she was a kid, her “big science nerd” of a dad watched NOVA all the time with her along with dinosaur documentaries, and she could always turn to him for support in her career aspirations.

That support has continued for her current dream — to work for NASA’s plant research team. Astronaut Scott Kelly’s memoir, which dives into his work on growing plants in space, was really influential to the sophomore who currently works with plants in Walter Gassmann’s lab at Bond LSC. The challenges Kelly faced such as carbon dioxide levels and malfunctioning filters got the gears in Creach’s mind turning.

“I just think it’s the most pressing issue, with climate change and all, to look into long term space research,” she said. “I love the idea of what we can learn in space – the possibilities it holds.”

Creach comes from the land 30 miles south – Jefferson City, and she said she was always good at math growing up, so people often put her into science classes, too.

“When I was in sixth grade, we did this genetics unit and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” she said. “So, I wanted to be a genetic counselor, and then eventually I realized that lots of people are suffering, and if I go into research I can help with genetic diseases.”

But her goals were constantly evolving, and landing in a lab freshman year continued to change her. She got her start in the Gassmann lab through the plant sciences freshman research group, in part because of her ambition of getting into a research lab as soon as possible. But that chance placement has grown into a love for a field she sees as the future of research.

Creach enjoys how focusing on the basics, such as a single protein, can be incredibly useful. She sees research in its purest form as a possibility to understand the nuance of science in its pursuit to understand. Science is both concrete and open-ended in her mind, and the combination of those two things brings her back to her research every day.

“In the sciences, I like that biology is much more situational; you can’t apply one concept to everything else, it’s just a little random,” she said.

Outside of research, she loves to read, mountain bike, hike, camp and generally be outdoors. Lately, she’s been reading the classics. One of her favorite books is “Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock,” which is a fiction book that touches on heavy topics such as suicide. She said it was really eye-opening for her and she still thinks about it regularly. Another book that has stuck with her is “Where Bigfoot Walks.”

“I love that book,” she said in between laughs. “I am of the school of thought that Bigfoot is 1,000 percent real and out there, but I don’t think that he should be discovered; that would ruin bigfoot.”

Now halfway through her second year, she’s working with other undergrads in the bioinformatics and plant science program. She grows the plants and collects the data, and the computer scientists analyze it. She says her eventual goal from studying biology is to get into a Ph.D. program in biology or plant sciences.

“The past two years have changed the way I think about science education,” she said. “You can hear a million lectures on something, but you can’t really understand it until you apply it. It was really hard at first; it was like trying to translate Spanish having no knowledge of Spanish.”

Like many others, she appreciates the ability to learn from and work with different labs in Bond LSC. Trying to understand it all and presenting her research — especially to the knowledgeable people in this building — is a huge challenge for her that she said can be a little intimidating.

“I’m working toward it,” she said.

#IAmScience Paul Martin

October 25, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: Walter Gassmann

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

Two years ago, Paul Martin found his love for biology in a freshman-level non-majors course. He’s now a researcher in Walter Gassmann’s lab helping to study transcription factors that regulate a plant’s immune response to bacterial pathogens.

Martin grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, near Arrowhead Stadium and has always loved sports. He recalled caring more about baseball stats in school than learning. By the time he reached high school, he loved to write and thought he could make a career out of it.

“I hated school until eighth grade,” he said. “I just it didn’t interest me.”

Originally a business and journalism double major, his biology professor approached him and told him he had a knack for it. It was that interaction that made him realize that his love for science could turn into a career in research.

“I’m very happy,” he said. “I wish I could go back and switch freshman year so I wouldn’t have to try to catch up.”

He hopes to one day work for the government through USDA or research through a university. He’s really interested in plant genetics; the challenge and joy of learning something new bring him back into the lab every week.

” I love learning how every little piece interacts, learning why things do what they do and getting answers to big questions that maybe no one has yet,” he said.

Balancing schoolwork, research and other interests has been the biggest challenge for him so far, but he values the opportunity to learn about a lot of different topics. He hopes to minor in philosophy for fun and is frequently listening to political podcasts. Right now, he’s listening to “Love it or leave it” by crooked media.

Along with his intellectual interests, he also loves to calm down by sketching.

“I’m not overly creative,” he said. “So I have to have something to base everything off of, but I enjoy it when I have time.”

Martin, like many scientists, is a goal-oriented individual. When he sets a goal, he said he’ll stop at nothing to make sure it gets done. Right now, he wants to run a half marathon before he graduates and he wants to get into a good graduate program.

He’s looking into Kansas State, University of Oregon, MU and the University of Toronto to study plant genetics and immune systems. He hopes to end up here at MU but said that he will go where the research takes him.

“Unlike most other things, there is really no subjectivity to science,” he said. “Everything’s objective. Even if you don’t know exactly what’s objective about it, eventually you discover the objective truth underlying what you’re studying.”

Martin said he’s proud of the progress he’s made amongst some great colleagues and hopes to continue improving.

“I really like the people,” he said. “I like the laid back atmosphere and I’m really looking forward to what the future has in store for this lab.”

Regulating a balance between protection and growth

October 15, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in Research Tags: Ben Spears, Walter Gassmann

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

It’s a sensitive balance between growth and defense when it comes to plants.

While a built-in, passive immune system helps them survive attackers, this response halts the growth and development of the plant, something that fascinates Ben Spears in the lab of Walter Gassmann at Bond LSC.

“In our lab, we try to pick apart the different signaling pathways governing these processes of growth and maintaining an immune response; we think of them as distinct processes, but, in reality, they are all interconnected,” Spears said. “If we can unlock the ability to manipulate how these signaling pathways work together to allow the plant to decide whether to grow or protect itself, it’ll go a long way toward producing plants that are better adapted to their environments.”

That’s what has led Spears to work with the Arabidopsis TCP Transcription Factor family. Transcription factors are proteins that “turn genes on or off,” as Spears puts it. They selectively activate certain sets of genes by interacting directly with family-specific sequences of DNA.

Spears is a postdoc researching molecular plant genetics such as the plant-specific (TCP) transcription factor family. Classically, the TCPs — named for early family members TEOSINTE BRANCHED1 (maize)/CYCLOIDEA (snapdragon)/PROLIFERATING CELL FACTOR (rice)— have only been known to regulate things such as branching, leaf size, growth, and other external structures of the plant, but, more recently, the Gassmann lab and other groups have identified them as regulators of immunity, making it the perfect subject of research. Spears focused on one of the multiple layers of this function to hone in on immune response in this family of transcription factors.

Detecting an attack

At the surface of a plant cell, there are receptors that will identify the presence of bacteria, and then initiate an immune response in the plant. Spears found that several members of the TCP family seemed to turn on this immunity process. This discovery, along with previously understood processes of growth in TCP showed that these two responses are tied together locally. It is this connection that has sprouted a high level of excitement and interest in the hormone biology research community recently.

“In terms of overall impact, this is a really exciting family of proteins,” Spears said. “They’ve been on the scene for a while, but only recently they’ve started to explode in terms of broad interest in the field. It’s nice to work on something that others are interested in, it makes you feel like you’re doing something that could potentially have an impact.”

Spears said it always comes back to the tradeoff between these two plant processes.

“A plant may be immune to pathogen infection, which is great because agronomically we want our crops to not be affected by pathogens out there, but it can come at the cost of growth, which affects the yield,” he said.

There’s a tight regulatory control system in plants that decides how it will spend its energy resources, and it’s affected by factors such as heat, water, light availability, or pathogen stresses. If researchers can better pinpoint the connection of these growth-immunity processes, they are one step closer to creating crops that can be better suited to their environments.

The nuts and bolts of this work involved a lot of bacterial infection assays and basic genetics, but a new technique presented a challenge for Spears. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP-Seq) technique helped demonstrate the direct interaction between Spears’ protein, the transcription factor of interest and the DNA. He said it was tricky for the lab because they hadn’t tried this method before, so he had to consult outside resources and push himself to learn new skills. Transcription factors control the rate at which a cell converts the DNA blueprint into the RNA messenger that carries the instructions to make proteins for a cell’s structures, enzymes and signaling, among others.

Collaboration across scientific fields almost always leads to better science, and Spears said conversations with researchers of different expertise helped push him into the next portion of his research. A common theme amongst researchers in Bond LSC, he values the community atmosphere and intellectual diversity.

“This study focuses on the other side of the equation, plant growth, and the role that TCPs may play in the plant response to brassinosteroids, an important group of phytohormones controlling plant growth,” he said.

After two years of work and a successfully published paper, Spears entered this next phase of research, a launchpad into a second experiment on brassinosteroid signaling. He’s trying to figure out how this operates on both sides of growth and defense at the same time.

“There is what we think to be a large regulatory transcription complex that these transcription factors may be a central component of, so the piece that actually does the work turning genes on and off,” he said. “There’s still a lot to learn.”

Ultimately, Spears and others are interested in more clearly identifying how TCPs interact with and/or are controlled by these other pieces to help plants decide whether to defend or to grow.

The tradeoff

Researchers are interested in this because the intricate trade-off affects agriculture in significant ways.

“Yield is important to a world that is desperately going to need to feed people in the future, specifically under increasing amounts of duress,” he said. “Growth environments aren’t getting better; they’re changing, and when things change, host-pathogen interactions change too. In the future, microbes that weren’t necessarily pathogenic might become pathogenic because of shifts in temperature, humidity and light that is available to them.”

Since proteins secreted from a pathogen ‘target’ the TCP-family and biochemically change how the TCP protein works to promote infection, it’s only natural for scientists to try to lessen the hardships crops endure. So, it should be clear that if pathogens are interested in specific transcription factors, then researchers should be, too, according to Spears. If researchers can better understand why and, by extension, tell what the transcription factors are doing, then they can potentially understand how to knockout that weak link that allows for infection and limit an attack within the plant.

Spears said that the interactions between a host and pathogen change faster than researchers can change to combat it, so they must better understand what those pathogens are doing to continually be better in the future. He said this research has the potential to help a world that needs reliable agriculture. Though some parts of the research were stressful, a great team made it a fantastic experience.

Part of this research published in the journal Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions in May 2019. Read more specifics in the paper “Direct regulation of the EFR-dependent immune response by arabidopsis TCP transcription factors.”

#IAmScience Yuan Yuxiang

September 27, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: Chris Pires

I am science because I want to breed more new elite Brassica vegetable varieties and make people more healthy.

Twenty-two years is a long time to focus on a single vegetable, but Yuxiang Yuan has done just that with Chinese cabbage.

That focus has led her away from her normal life in China to the Chris Pires lab at Bond LSC for a year-long project that’s winding to an end.

After a 20-plus hour flight from China and over 7,000 miles of traveling, Yuxiang Yuan arrived here, excited for a new adventure and the opportunity to improve a staple vegetable for Asia.

Yuan was awarded a fellowship from the International Cultivation of Henan Advanced Talents with the ambition of using hybridizing Chinese cabbage to be more disease resistant. She has been crossing the genes of Chinese cabbage with rutabaga, and, with the help of the Pires lab, has found four clubroot resistant accessions of rutabaga and four susceptible accessions of rutabaga. An accession is a group of related plant material from a single species which is collected at one time in an attempt to capture the diversity present in a given population of plants.

Many Americans probably don’t often think of Chinese cabbage, but for China, the cultivation and yield rank it as the most important vegetable to the economy. Clubroot is a devastating disease to Chinese cabbage and other Brassica crops. In 28 provinces in China, this disease hit cabbage, resulting in 20-90 percent yield loss. Yuan has made it her life’s mission to make cabbage more resistant to the disease, and she said she’s proud of the progress she’s made over the past year.

“In China, I am a research professor,” Yuan said. “Most of the time, I will go to the field to observe my genetic materials and try to breed new varieties more quickly. Here, I am learning new techniques and teaching students in Pires lab. I take part in routine lab management and in a lot of symposium workshops and seminars. I really love Pires’ lab meeting every week.”

You might think Yuan would tire of Chinese cabbage after all that time, but she still loves and values what she gets to accomplish. She said from her undergraduate degree to now, it’s always been about vegetables.

“Science can change everything,” Yuan said, hopeful to make such an important vegetable more stable for millions of people.

One of her favorite things about being at the Bond LSC is the new methods she’s been able to implement in her research. She said with CRISPR and other technologies, scientists can breed vegetables faster and more efficiently. She’s also really enjoyed working with the Pires lab and said the community in this building has been welcoming and friendly.

“I leave in November, and I will miss the people and the dynamic atmosphere here,” she said. “When I first came, I could barely speak English. After almost one year visiting, I have improved a lot.”

Science inspires Yuan to ask tough questions, seek answers and, hopefully, make the world a healthier, happier place through genetic breeding. She may leave next month, but her legacy will live on through the relationships she’s built and the international collaboration she’s helped create.

“I really love the atmosphere in this building, there is inclusive equality and diversity,” she said. “After I return to China, I will continue our collaboration between our institution and MU. I think that one may go quickly, but a team can go further.”

Around the shore a million stood

September 25, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in Events and speakers Tags: Living Wall

The complex title of the new painting in Bond LSC represents the nuance of its meaning.

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

It appears to simply showcase a spectrum of beautiful colors, but there is much more than meets the eye to the painting above the plant wall by Monsanto Auditorium in Bond Life Sciences Center. Its creative expression is the work of local artist Kerry Hirth and has a particularly unique provenance.

Dean Bergstrom approached Hirth one day when she was in the administrative offices hanging some of her paintings as part of a program where the Columbia Art League loans out artwork to offices for exposure and sale. He walked her down to the living wall, pointed above it and said, we need something to fill that space, will you do it?

This led to the art piece that hangs above the living wall, which is the largest and most challenging work that Hirth has ever created. While she is proud of the outcome, she said she’ll never create something that large again.

Hirth had to plan for a variety of things such as discoloration of the wood board from the pastels, the scalability of her art onto something much larger than normal, exposure to dust and the test of time, among other things, which made the project the challenge of a career.

“It took a long time – there were some things I couldn’t control,” she said. “The epic nature of planning the materials and the execution of meeting a specific end result was challenging.”

After months of preparation and planning on her end and with Bond LSC’s facility staff, she finally began to paint the real deal. Equipped with her hazmat suit, her facemask, an endless supply of gloves that built up over time and the large wooden board, she took creative determination to an entirely new level.

“The project was like mental torture,” she said. “When you’re an artist sometimes physical exhaustion isn’t a thing. If you have the impulse to do something, then you have to do it. I wanted to make a really large painting and I did.”

Hirth is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and received both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Philosophy. She now teaches ethics at Moberly Community College along with producing art. She’s a woman with many interests, which only aids in the complexity of meaning in her work. She said her work isn’t meant to be socially or politically charged but is meant to stir the imagination.

In 2007 when Hirth and her husband moved to Chicago, inspiration struck. She recalls he had a fantastic office with a nice view and spent a great deal of time there. So, she decided to create an art piece to bring some color to his day. For something to hang in the spot she imagined, it would have to be long and thin, so she went to the store and bought the supplies. Little did she know that would be the beginning of a career in art.

Around that time, Hirth found out she had synesthesia, a condition where one of the senses is simultaneously perceived with another. In her case, she sees color attached to sound, more specifically music.

“I wanted something that was meaningful in that space,” she said. “For whatever reason, I used that paper, started from left to right, and began to paint in the colors of music. It happened to be a Bach piece.”

Growing up playing piano and drawing with pastels, this project for her husband’s office brought two of her loves together in a transformative way. To others, it seems incomprehensible to associate a complex musical composition with such specific colors, but to Hirth, things are much clearer. Her brain sees a reality that most people can’t imagine.

“Because the experience is so consistent with harmony and color, that’s how I can create a pattern,” she said, pointing to the horizon in the distance. She said it’s just like the pattern of a horizon that stretches from bottom to top, she naturally sees certain colors from left to right when hearing a musical composition.

Though Hirth didn’t discover this specific form of art until later on in her life, she’s always had an impulse to create things, and said it isn’t about casually following desire, but about being pulled to do something. After that first painting, she had to create more.

“I was always aware of how I was different, but I couldn’t before express it in a way that was interpretable to people, and evidently now I can,” she said.

The painting has many more depths than just the color she sees through Sonata in E Major K162 by Domenico Scarlatti. She also connects the left to right color scheme to the first section of The Wanderings of Oisin by Yeats.

Hirth had previously collaborated with a composer on the poem to create art for a previous show. This amounted to an acquaintance with the piece that was hard to shake. She says it worked its way into her everyday thoughts for months and the colors associated with the epic poem were also colors she saw in that composition. She chose the two for the painting because they combined together on so many meaningful levels. She said the epic poem is something bigger than herself; it simply amplifies the importance of the work.

“In the story, Oisin is a mortal king who gets taken by an immortal woman to her home in the Irish Isles,” she said. “It’s about the three different islands that they visit throughout his journey and his return back to human lands.”

The colors in the painting represent the journey that Oisin takes throughout the story. It represents a narrative, the deeper metaphors within that narrative and a complex musical composition as well. What can easily be taken as a pallet of colors up on a wall, is in reality a painting with more levels than any of us could ever intuitively understand.

“The painting itself is divided into three parts,” Hirth said. “The first part is water, the second part is land and the third part is sky.”

Hirth thought and planned for months to help create the perfect symbol for not only the living wall but for the Bond Life Sciences Center. Though it was the toughest project she’s worked on so far, she’s proud of the outcome.

The artwork Hirth created can be seen outside of Monsanto Auditorium above the plant wall. Minus the cost of supplies, Hirth graciously donated the piece to Bond LSC to inspire our scientists, students and visitors.

#IAmScience Liz Countee

September 13, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: Chris Pires

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

#IAmScience because science allows people to find their own creativity through the art of research.

Every Friday afternoon, the Pires lab can be found in the greenhouse washing pots and cleaning up, and while this could easily be seen as a mundane part of the week, Liz Countee sees it as an opportunity to joke around and enjoy the company of her awesome team.

“I love being surrounded by so many other people that are extremely intelligent and passionate,” she said. “It’s such a great group of people and it’s more than a place to work and do research, it’s a community in itself.”

Countee, an undergrad studying biochemistry, has been in the Pires lab for a year and a half now and has really cherished the experience. Recently, she has been working on coding genome-wide association studies. She said what used to be a foreign concept to her has become an opportunity to grow and progress in new areas. Her mentor and labmates have helped push her in a positive direction throughout her time in the lab, and she loves that there’s always someone looking out for her.

“I’ve gained confidence in being a researcher and my abilities to learn new things even though they may be out of the realm of what I’m used to,” she said.

Though some projects she’s worked on in the lab have been an intellectual reach for her, she’s learned that taking that leap into something new, even if she fails at first, is one of the most beneficial things one can do in life. In research, a lot of things don’t work out, so getting used to multiple tries has been one of the biggest and most beneficial challenges she’s experienced in the lab.

“I enjoy the wider applications of research,” she said. “Of course what I’m doing seems like such a small part, but it can help general plant breeding programs or crop development, and so it becomes bigger. It makes me feel like my little part is making a difference because in the end when it comes together it’ll be one successful product that can benefit a lot of people.”

In May, Countee will receive her undergraduate degree and move on to a master’s program in the fall. After a summer of travel and enjoying those she loves, she plans to dive into a two-year program to become a genetic counselor. Her hope is to one day educate and counsel people on testing, treatment, genetic history and so on. Though she’s excited about her future career, she isn’t quite ready to move on just yet.

“If I had gone to a different university I would not have had such a great experience, and here I’ve really come into myself, and I realize now what I care about and what type of person I am. I’m really grateful to have been here.”

More than anything, she’s grateful for her time at Mizzou and in the Pires lab. She said it’s become more than just a job to her and she values the community she gets to experience.

#IAmScience Carolyn Robinson

August 30, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in #IAmScience Tags: Marc Johnson

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

When Carolyn Robinson was a kid, she was fascinated by the world around her. She remembers putting scabs under magnifying glasses and squishing bugs to try and understand the oddities of the world.

“Science continuously blows my mind,” Robinson said. “There’s always something where you almost don’t believe it at first, and there is so much we still don’t know, even about something as simple as a virus.”

As a now 3rd-year graduate student working on her Ph.D. in molecular pathogenesis and therapeutics in Marc Johnson’s lab, she is still attempting to make sense of the puzzling things around her. She screens potential compounds that might block VPU, a protein that helps HIV escape the host.

Robinson grew up with parents who taught her the value of solving a puzzle on her own. She said this influenced her and gave her curiosity more direction throughout her life.

“My dad’s favorite quote was there’s more than one way to do anything, so if I was frustrated about something he’d encourage me to find a new way, or if I didn’t know how to spell a word he’d give me the first letter and make me find it in the dictionary,” she said.

Though she enjoys the small victories of solving puzzles, she said it can be easy to get lost in the day-to-day of research and lose sight of the big picture. When she faces a challenge or needs to clear her mind, she takes a 15-minute walk around campus to gain perspective, and the possibility of learning something new keeps her interested and excited throughout her research.

“You don’t expect to want to come in at 9 p.m. to check on some cells,” she said laughing.

During her undergraduate degree in cellular and molecular biology at Depaul University in Chicago, a mentor helped her realize her interest in doing research. After interviewing with different graduate programs, the experience she had with MU drew her in. She loves the atmosphere of not only her lab but of the community inside Bond LSC.

Though she isn’t certain where her studies will take her, she hopes to continue learning and participating in the community that science generates.

“I hope to be able to get science out into the community and explain science in a way that makes people who don’t have a degree in it to find it as interesting as I do,” she said.

A program that pushes science forward

May 16, 2019 By Danielle Pycior in Research Tags: Genomics Technology Core

By Danielle Pycior | Bond LSC

It’s the little things we take for granted, and for science experiments, one of those are enzymes.

French chemist Anselme Payen discovered the first enzyme, diastase, in 1833, but it wasn’t until 1877 that the word enzyme was used. While it’s a compact name, it’s really a category of proteins produced by living organisms that speed up chemical reactions regardless of whether it’s in the body or the test tube. The way these proteins are folded make their chemical interaction very specific, but when they bind with the right molecules, they speed up reactions hundreds or thousands of times. Since their first discovery, researchers have found thousands more enzymes that play an integral role in even more scientific discoveries.

A program on the second floor of Bond Life Sciences Center gives scientists the small something they need to make those discoveries. The Enzyme Freezer Program — part of the MU Genomics Technology Core— began in the 1990s and has grown to provide enzymes for 120 different labs across the University of Missouri campus.

Though it has become a staple in the science community, allowing researchers to walk down the stairs or make a call across campus to find what they need, this convenience helps quickly and quietly move science forward.

“Modern research requires a lot of expensive things,” said Kate Shipova, freezer program specialist. “For end-users, it’s convenient because they can come and buy something immediately.”

Shipova spends her days talking with sales representatives and vendors, fixing problems and finding researchers the substances they need to continue searching for answers. The lab is lined with refrigerators and freezers, all stocked full of substances used every day in labs around campus and around the world for anything from genome sequencing to nucleic acid purification.

Nowadays, it’s normal to have fairly easy access to any substance scientists may need for their research, but generations ago this would have been difficult to imagine. Walter Gassmann, Bond LSC interim director and professor of plant sciences, recalled visiting a colleague in Morocco who works for its government. She has to order everything she needs for her lab an entire year in advance, while MU researchers can get what they need on a whim if needed.

“I think it’s too easy to take things for granted that was more work before, and this really accelerates your research,” Gassmann said. “It helps not having to plan far in advance.”

The program has numerous chemicals in stock and the ability special order almost any enzyme a researcher may need, shipping it for free and at a discounted price. Nathan Bivens, assistant director of the MU Genomics Technology Core, said most of the chemicals are used for molecular biology or proteomics research, so the common reagents they keep in stock work with RNA and DNA.

“It’s really an advantage to a researcher who wants to make that grant dollar stretch since it’s a much more affordable option,” Bivens said. “Plus, it’s here and readily available. You have the ability to come here and get the reagent quickly.”

In many parts of the world, researchers aren’t so lucky to work in a place with resources this readily available, with a staff dedicated to helping. Shipova and Bivens work to make researchers’ lives easier by providing the chemicals they need at an affordable price, and scientists such as Gassmann appreciate all of the hard work they do.

“In other countries, an enzyme has to be shipped, and it can get stuck in customs and it doesn’t get treated right. Here things are so much easier.”

What was once only a dream for scientists who couldn’t so readily access the tools they need is now a common and easily accessible program. While new technologies and methods continue to take the spotlight, freezer programs and those who run them will continue working in buildings like Bond LSC to quickly make reactions happen.

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