News

The University of Colorado was recently awarded a cooperative agreement worth up to $14.6 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a new technological system to rapidly determine how drugs and biological or chemical agents affect human cells. The project, called the Subcellular Pan-Omics for the...

BioFrontiers partners with world’s oldest biotech industry: Breweries In the basement of the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building on CU-Boulder’s East Campus sits a machine that can sequence roughly 6 billion DNA segments in about a week. By comparison, human DNA consists of roughly 3 billion bases, and it took...

JSCBB Mini Symposium Encourages Collaboration It looks a lot like the other buildings on the CU-Boulder campus, with its rustic Italian-inspired tile roof and red brick, but the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building (affectionately known by its inhabitants as JSCBB) is something quite different. It was designed to support those...

It must be said that I have had a very difficult time writing this blog-post. The reason, after a few too many cups of coffee, came clear to me: Science is Hard (and I worried if that’s what I should tell my readers). Certainly there are intellectual struggles in Science,...

CU-Boulder Student Team Wows Judges at Premiere Biology Competition When this year’s iGEM team at the University of Colorado Boulder began meeting early this year, they wanted to take what they knew about biology, and use it to build something entirely new. iGEM, or International Genetically Engineered Machine , is...

Studying Quantitative Genomics in Italy By: Nora Connor I returned this past weekend from a conference and workshop called Quantitative Laws of Genome Evolution in Lake Como, Italy. An Italian physicist named Marco Lagomarsino created the conference, which brought together an interdisciplinary group of statistical physicists, biophysicists, chemists and biologists...

The newly constructed structure in the National Botanical Gardens in Ireland, meant to symbolize the flow of information from DNA to RNA and proteins, contains a representation of the DNA double helix, a ribosome, and thehammerhead ribozyme. Sculptures of the DNA helix have been constructed all over the world ;...

BioFrontiers scientist tackles a childhood disease of the heart BioFrontiers Chief Scientific Officer Leslie Leinwand, has been studying the motor protein, myosin, for 25 years. This important protein is responsible for making muscles contract, including one vital muscle: your heart. Myosin drives heart muscle contraction, and when this protein is...

IQ Bio Blog: Interdisciplinarity on Steroids by: Ryan Langendorf At my last mentoring committee meeting, after discussing the tug-of-war that the Environmental Studies and IQ Biology programs have been playing with my schedule, Dr. Brett Melbourne paused and quietly commented that my life is “interdisciplinarity on steroids!” We all laughed,...

CU professor co-founds new company to develop genetic heart disease treatment A new biomedical company involving the University of Colorado Boulder, Stanford University and the Harvard Medical School has been launched with $38 million in financing from Third Rock Ventures LLC headquartered in Boston and San Francisco to develop therapeutic...