GCB News

This fall, GCB welcomed two new members: Anne Yoder, Ph.D., and Purushothama Rao Tata, Ph.D.

A single criterion predicts whether a genetic package such as antibiotic resistance will thrive in a given environment.

Lingchong You, Ph.D., and Ashutosh Chilkoti, Ph.D., are collaborating with researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Princeton University, and University of North Carolina on a five-year, $7.5 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award from the Department of Defense.

“For the longest time, the central dogma of biology was that structure equals function,” Chilkoti said. “But some proteins lack that structure, so they had been considered unimportant.” Research now, though, is showing that is not the case. 

Here are summaries of a selection of the papers published by GCB faculty in October 2020:

COVID-19

Greg Wray and team used statistical methods they developed to identify adaptive changes that arose in the SARS-CoV-2 genome in humans, but not in closely related coronaviruses found in bats and pangolins to help figure out what makes the virus so unique. Read more

In FY20, 17 new start-up companies formed at Duke, according to Duke’s Office of Licensing and Ventures (OLV).

Binding to mismatched DNA takes less energy; may explain how regulatory mutations get locked in.

RNA folding may help explain how the coronavirus became so hard to stop after it spilled over from wildlife to humans.

Highlights to the current issue include

Here are summaries of a selection of the papers published by GCB faculty in September 2020:

Anne Yoder is GCB's newest faculty member. She is featured on Duke University's Fundamental Concepts discussing how evidenced-based conservation biology is one of our best approaches to mitigate the current biodiversity crisis on Earth.