News and Publications

Recent faculty addition in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics talks about genome size evolution in Quanta magazine. Read more

Alani Lab, The mismatch repair and meiotic recombination endonuclease Mlh1-Mlh3 is activated by polymer formation and can cleave DNA substrates in trans Read more

Peter Sullivan, a fifth-year doctoral student, is the winner of this year's Harry and Samuel Mann Outstanding Graduate Student Award for his research on ALS and FTLD. Read more

The GAL4 gene expression system has been a powerful tool for two-part control of fruit fly (Drosophila) genes for over two decades; but, until now, GAL4 has not worked in the model nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Wang, Liu, and others have developed standardized driver and effector lines that use GAL4 from a cryophilic yeast species, Saccharomyces kudriavzevii. Unlike its more famous relative. S. cerevisiae, S. kudriavzevii grows well at temperatures close to 20 deg. C., the preferred growth temperature for C. elegans. Temperature-optimized GAL4 shows robust activity in C. elegans and should enable many new experiments in it. These findings have been published in the February 2017 issue of Nature Methods with a cover illustration representing C. elegans artistically by Voronoi tessellation. Erich Schwarz, research scientist in nematode genomics at MBG, was the Cornell member of this collaboration.
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Raj has been doing medical research since she was 14 years old. Now as a postdoc at Cornell, she works as a population geneticist focused on how evolutionary adaptations have elevated or lowered different groups' susceptibility to chronic disease. She's researched everything from hypertension in African patients to adaptation to cold among native Siberians. Read more

Global Diversity Lines–A Five-Continent Reference Panel of Sequenced Drosophila melanogaster Strains Read more

Chip Aquadro receives honorary degree from alma mater Read more

For the first time, Cornell researchers report they have identified biological markers of chronic fatigue syndrome in gut bacteria and inflammatory microbial agents in the blood. Read more