university of minnesota Archives

Configuring new bonds between first-row transition metals

Written by Rachel Allison

Professor Lu’s lab seeks to develop homogeneous catalysts for converting abundant small molecules, such as N2 and CO2, into useful chemical feedstocks, such as ammonia and methanol, respectively. The group is interested in creating, understanding and exploiting new chemical bonding.

Transition metals are some of the most important elements in the Periodic Table for their wealth of applications, spanning catalysis to biology. The rich chemistry of the transition metals arises from their remarkable ability to form multiple chemical bonds, a process that is still not fully understood and remains a major challenge in fundamental chemistry. Professor Connie Lu at the […]

Open-source bioinformatic solutions for ‘Big Data’ analysis

Written by Rachel Allison

In this research article: Drs Griffin and Jagtap’s research focuses on the Galaxy-P project – developing, testing, optimising and applying multi-omics software tools to a variety of biological questions, including cancer and big data research.

Drs Tim Griffin and Pratik Jagtap along with the Galaxy-P team from the University of Minnesota are working to develop workflows on an open source platform for the analysis of multi-omic data. They are currently focusing on using a Galaxy-based framework to investigate the integration of genomic datasets with mass spectrometry-based ‘omics’ data. But in the long term, they aim […]

Synthetic cells have senses too

Written by Rachel Allison

this article is about Prof Liu and Prof Noireaux’s project aim is to construct synthetic cells, consisting of a cell-free expression system encapsulated into a cell-sized phospholipid vesicle, capable of sensing the environment through its lipid bilayer by expressing mechanosensitive channels.

What defines a living cell? How to capture the molecular essence of life? These fundamental questions underpin the collaborative research programme led by Prof Allen Liu at the University of Michigan and Prof Vincent Noireaux at the University of Minnesota. The pair uses molecular components to construct prototypes of synthetic cells displaying the minimal characteristics of life. Their ‘cell analogs’ […]