News: Research

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

Cockrell School of Engineering

Biomedical, Chemical Engineering Professor George Georgiou Named UT Austin Inventor of the Year

UT Austin's 2014 Inventor of the Year award was presented to Georgiou by the Office of Technology Commercialization.

The UT Tower is in the background and in the foreground flowers spell U T in a garden

Research

Trapping a Bacterium in a Laser Beam Aids Study of Biofilms

Biofilms are responsible for most chronic infections and are notoriously resilient and hard to treat.

Two-channel fluorescence image of a stamped pattern of P. aeruginosa in an isotropic background of S. aureus at t = 6 h, after the initial pattern has developed into a localized cluster.

Research

Possible Explanation for Human Diseases Caused by Defective Ribosomes

A new study, which uses a genetic approach to examine this paradox, suggests ribosomopathies are caused by a sequence of mistakes at the molecular level.

An illustration of a molecular structure with surface structures and smaller molecular structures of varying sizes floating nearby