BIOCHEMISTRY

Students all learn differently, especially when it comes to sciences like biochemistry. Some are visual learners, others auditory. Sometimes things click better after a demonstration. It can be helpful for others to be able to listen or watch something multiple times rather than having to absorb it in just one lecture.

Online education can help instructors provide these additional learning opportunities and Lynne Prost, a faculty associate in the Department of Biochemistry, used a university professional development grant to expand her expertise in this area. Thanks to the 2018...

Scientists in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry are watching evolution happen in real time.

In a study published online this month in the Journal of Bacteriology, biochemistry professor Michael Cox and his team describe blasting E. coli bacteria with ionizing radiation once a week, causing the bacteria to become radiation resistant. In doing so, they have uncovered genetic mutations and mechanisms underlying this resistance.

The findings reveal ways to possibly engineer radiation-resistant bacteria to use for various applications in the future,...

Huda Zoghbi of the Baylor College of Medicine will give the 2019 UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry Steenbock Lectures in early March. All members of the campus community are invited to attend these lectures and learn from this pioneer in understanding the molecular basis of human neurological disorders.

In high school, Judith Simcox pored over scientific literature to try to understand the link between her sister’s Down Syndrome and type 1 diabetes. It was the first time she asked a question that didn’t have an answer yet — and it led her down the path of answering unknown questions as a metabolism researcher and advocate for diversity in science.

Simcox, whose work specifically focuses on how organs communicate through lipid signaling to respond to the energy demands of cold exposure, has joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry as its newest assistant...

A major goal of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is to harness the power of microbes to create biofuels. But often, it’s an expensive challenge for scientists to identify the most useful individual variants among thousands of similar microbe strains. A new study led by Vatsan Raman, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, unveils a biosensor that may light the way to the best microbial candidates for biofuel production.

In search of the best biofuel-producing microbes, scientists may need to make millions of variants via genetic...

If you’ve ever grown carrots in your garden and puzzled over never once seeing them flower, don’t blame a missing green thumb.

Carrots, beets and many other plants won’t flower until they’ve gone through winter. The extended cold gives them the signal to flower quickly once spring arrives, providing the plants an edge in the race to produce seeds.

But cold isn’t always required. In the 1930s, two English scientists discovered that some crops in the grass family, like rye or wheat, can use short days instead of cold to tell them when winter has come.

“But nothing was...

Nutrients in. Waste out. Everyone and almost every living thing does it, even at the cellular level. It seems like a simple enough concept: to survive, cells have to have a way to move different types of molecules in and out of themselves. It’s how they take in food, get rid of waste, send signals to each other, sense their environment, and more. But the reality is much more complex. Transmembrane proteins — those embedded in the cell membrane and of which some are responsible for this transmission of molecules — are notoriously hard to study and understand.