University of Wisconsin–Madison

Category: News

News items and stories about department’s faculty, programs, research, students, staff, etc.

Hiroshi Maeda wins funding to further study how plants can overspend carbon in photosynthesis

Professor Hiroshi Maeda and Michigan State University researcher Berkley Walker were awarded a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study how plants compensate when they “overspend” carbon in the process of photosynthesis. Read the full article here:  https://prl.natsci.msu.edu/news-and-events/news/2024-08-nsf-grant-awarded-to-study-what-happens-when-plants-overspend%20.aspx

Award funds Muir lab work to identify genetic and developmental changes during adaptive radiation

Chris Muir, an assistant professor in the Department of Botany, is part of a team that received a three-year $1.3 million award ($352,9997 to UW-Madison) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project, Evolutionary and functional genomics of Hawaiian Bidens: determining the genetic basis of phenotypic trait diversification in a rapid adaptive radiation, is in collaboration …

Creating Glass Models of Deep Sea Creatures

Aquatic invertebrates are often difficult to study when they are living, and some can’t even survive outside their deep-ocean habitats. That’s why, 127 years ago, University of Wisconsin biology professor Edward Birge purchased glass models of sea creatures ranging from jellyfish to sea cucumbers from famous German glassblowers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, for use in …

Stability relies on dispersal in parasitic relationship between aphids and wasps.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison combined experiments with mathematical modeling to learn that dispersal of organisms involved in parasitic relationships through space can play an important role in balancing the effects of both ecology and evolution on those relationships, such as the one between Aphidius ervi and pea aphids. Read more here: https://news.wisc.edu/stability-relies-on-dispersal-in-parasitic-relationship-between-aphids-and-wasps/