News: Research

Research

Promise of New Antibiotics Lies with Shackling Tiny Toxic Tetherballs to Bacteria

Bryan Davies of The University of Texas at Austin and a team have developed a system to identify new options for fighting bacteria.

Artist rendering of bacteria in orange on dark brown background

Research

Ancient Enzyme Could Boost Power of Liquid Biopsies to Detect and Profile Cancers

A set of medical tests called liquid biopsies could rapidly detect the presence of cancers, infectious diseases and other conditions from only a small blood sample.

Illustration of a person's circulatory system and the person is surrounded by bubbles of DNA

Research

UT Austin and Texas A&M Scientists Seek to Turn Plant Pests into Plant Doctors

Sap-sucking pests could deliver gene therapy to plants under attack from diseases, droughts or floods

Oleander aphid.

Research

Drug Engineered at UT Austin to Treat Anthrax Gains FDA Approval

The anthrax antitoxin obiltoxaximab received approval March 21 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

White bacterial coloines on a plate of red culture medium

Research

Scientists Study How DNA Repairs Itself Through Single Molecule Imaging

UT Austin scientists are doing research, which uses novel single-molecule imaging techniques partially developed by Finkelstein, and could lead to a better understanding of how cancerous cells repair their DNA.

Illustration of a new single-molecule imaging technique

UT News

Scientists Find Leukemia’s Surroundings Key to its Growth

A research team led by Lauren Ehrlich of the Department of Molecular Biosciences has discovered that a type of cancer found primarily in children can grow only when signaled to do so by other nearby cells that are noncancerous.

Dendritic cells shown in green in the tumor microenvironment T-Cell leukemia can only survive and grow send signals to cancer cells of other colors

UT News

Chemistry in Mold Reveals Important Clue for Pharmaceuticals

In a discovery from the lab of Jessie Zhang that holds promise for future drug development, scientists have detected for the first time how nature performs an impressive trick to produce key chemicals similar to those in drugs that fight malaria, bacterial infections and cancer.

Overall structure of FtmOx1, a mold enzyme that helps produce a toxin by adding a pair of oxygen atoms.

Research

Study Shows Common Molecular Tool Kit Organisms Share Across Tree of Life

Researchers at UT Austin discovered the assembly instructions for nearly 1,000 protein complexes shared by most kinds of animals.

Researchers created the world’s largest protein map, identifying nearly 1,000 protein complexes that are shared across the tree of life. This image shows a small portion of that map.

UT News

Genetic Road Map May Bring About Better Cotton Crops

A University of Texas at Austin scientist, working with an international research team, has developed the most precise sequence map yet of U.S. cotton and will soon create an even more detailed map for navigating the complex cotton genome.

Dr. Z. Jeff Chen inspects a cotton plant in a campus greenhouse. Photo: Marsha Miller