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A man in a lab setting in a white lab jacket holds two large beakers with low levels of liquid. One liquid is green and the other is yellow.

Study: Microalgae and bacteria team up to convert CO2 into useful products

Scientists have spent decades genetically modifying the bacterium Escherichia coli and other microbes to convert carbon dioxide into useful biological products. Most methods require additional carbon sources, however, adding to the cost. A new study overcomes this limitation by combining the photosynthetic finesse of a single-celled algae with the production capabilities of the bacteria E. coli.

A woman in a lab coat smiles while taking a measurement of leaves with a device.

Lawson brings renowned plant science expertise to Illinois

Tracy Lawson's fascination with plants started as a child on a farm in England and recently brought the globally recognized expert in plant biology across the pond to Illinois! One of the university's newest faculty members talks about her research and what she's looking forward to most in this new feature!

A cartoon yellow potato has had its skin peeled to form a bikini. It is wearing sunglasses and lounging on an orange beach chair, its arms folded behind its head. The peeled skin lays nearby in a coil. The chair is in the sand with the ocean and sun in the background.

RIPE 'hot potato' research appears in Scientific American

RIPE's Katherine Meacham-Hensold was interviewed for an article in Scientific American about her research looking at shortcutting the photorespiration process in potato.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Determining confidence intervals from the likelihood ratio ( ). (a–e) Likelihood ratio as each of apparent , apparent , , and apparent vary around their best-fit values, as determined by PhotoGEA for the curve in Figure 1 (designated ‘800 – wt-5 – mcgrath1’). The arrow in (d) shows a ‘kink’ where the likelihood deviates from a Gaussian distribution. The dotted line in (e) shows a Gaussian fit to the likelihood ratio near the peak. The likelihood ratio confidence interval extends to infinity but the G

PhotoGEA: An R Package for Closer Fitting of Photosynthetic Gas Exchange Data With Non-Gaussian Confidence Interval Estimation

Edward B. Lochocki, Coralie E. Salesse-Smith, Justin M. McGrath
Plant, Cell and Environment
10.1111/pce.15501
A man in a lab setting in a white lab jacket holds two large beakers with low levels of liquid. One liquid is green and the other is yellow.

Bioconversion of CO2 into valuable bioproducts via synthetic modular co-culture of engineered Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Escherichia coli

Nam Kyu Kang, Hyun Gi Koh, Yujung Choi, Hyunjun Min, Donald R. Ort, Yong-Su Jin
Metabolic Engineering
10.1016/j.ymben.2025.03.004
A sunny field of green soybean plants with a light blue sky in the background.

Variation in relaxation of non-photochemical quenchingbetween the founder genotypes of the soybean (Glycine max)nested association mapping population

Dhananjay Gotarkar, Anthony Digrado, Yu Wang, Lynn Doran, Ignacio Sparrow-Munoz, Sarah Chung, Nicholas Lisa, Farwah Wasiq, Gerardo Amaro, Bethany Blakely, Brian W. Diers, Daniel J. Eck and Steven J. Burgess
The Plant Journal
10.1111/tpj.17219