News: CBE

Five Cornell faculty members have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Read more

A Cornell project funded by two separate three-year grants will develop worm-like, soil-swimming robots to sense and record soil properties, water, the soil microbiome and how roots grow. Read more

Years before the novel coronavirus turned into a global pandemic, Susan Daniel was already looking for ways to defeat it. Daniel, a professor in Cornell’s Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, had created models of the host membrane to gain new insights into the virus SARS-CoV. Now referred to informally as SARS-CoV-1, the virus is a precursor and close relative of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 or SARS 2. Read more

Engineers from Cornell and North Carolina State University have proposed a creative solution: an army of swimming, self-propelled biomaterials called ‘microcleaners’ that scavenge and capture plastics so they can be decomposed by computationally-engineered microorganisms. Read more

Scientists hoping to understand these diseases can take heart: Researchers led by Nicholas Abbott, a Tisch University Professor in the Robert F. Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, created a way of using synthetic liquid crystals to squeeze red blood cells and gain new insight into individual cells’ mechanical properties. The process also illuminates minuscule differences between cells within a large population as each cell reacts to the same strain or force, revealing just how diverse the cells are. Read more

The DeLisa Group’s paper, “ Engineering Orthogonal Human O-linked Glycoprotein Biosynthesis in Bacteria,” published July 27 in Nature Chemical Biology. The lead author is Aravind Natarajan, Ph.D. ’19. Read more

“Layered tandem cells for solar panels offer more efficiency, so this is a promising route to widespread deployment of photovoltaics,” said Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering in the College of Engineering. Read more

Visit the CBE COVID resource page for current guidelines related to laboratory reactivation, reopening, and travel procedures Read more

This five-year $20 million grant will fund C-GEM research in 14 laboratories at UC Berkeley, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Boston College, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Read more

Susan Daniel and Gary Whittaker discuss their collaborations and others across Cornell’s campuses that are working to better understand the COVID-19 virus. Read more