Shawna Williams

To respond to the body’s needs, our cells are constantly switching specific genes on or off. Flipping the switch means the cells either start or stop making copies of a gene out of molecules known as RNA; these so-called “transcripts” are then read by protein-making machinery to manufacture the gene’s final product.

The Human Developmental Neurobiology Unit is primarily concerned not with theory or bench work, but with studying the causes and effects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to achieve tangible benefits for affected children and their families.

Could our waste be part of the answer to humanity’s energy problems? Some researchers think so, thanks to bacteria that chow down on everything from sewage to heavy metals and give off electricity as one of their own waste products.

In recent years scientists, including OIST Professor Keshav Dani, have begun to understand how nano engineered materials, together with the rules of quantum mechanics and relativity, allow us to make materials that violate the familiar rules about how stuff behaves.

In a paper published on August 17 in Cell, a team of researchers including OIST's Ulf Skoglund details a major step forward in understanding what caveolae look like and how they behave—and points the way toward a potentially game-changing method of drug delivery.

In two new papers, Prof. Bernd Kuhn and collaborators use novel techniques to visualize very different things: pH within protein crystals, and neurons in the cerebellum of the brain.

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Neuroscience, Prof. Erik De Schutter and his former postdoc Gabriela Antunes report that by constructing a computational model of many molecules in a part of the neuron that regulates synapse strength, they have gained new and surprising insight into what determines that strength.

With much of the equipment moved in and research units steadily populating its labs, cubicles, and offices, Lab 2, which opened late last month, is swiftly coming to life.

As we grow, an intricate choreography of genetic controls begins to differentiate our cells, turning some genes off and others up to full-blast, eventually yielding fully-formed animals. Researchers at OIST are working to learn more about this choreography.

In a paper published yesterday in Science, a team of researchers that includes OIST's Nick Luscombe shows that the long-accepted view of how male fruit flies manipulate their genes’ activity should be revised. Their finding shows how cells use a single, crucial regulator to change the activity of large numbers of genes at the same time.

The Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit, led by Evan Economo, uses classic tools of taxonomy—as well as genomic sequencing and computer modeling—to study how species evolve, move around, and adapt to their environments.