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MU Research: Discoveries Without Boundaries
Research ranging from fossilized evidence of ancient diets, to methods for boost the safety of soldiers and insights into cell structure all made news during FY 2007.
In February a team of researchers, including a paleoethnobotanist at MU, announced they had discovered "micro-fossil" starches from seven archaeological sites that showed people were eating domesticated chili peppers as long as 6,000 years ago. The finding, published in the Feb. 15, 2007 edition of Science, indicates that chili peppers are one of the oldest domesticated food sources in the Americas, and that their consumption was widely dispersed among Pre-Columbian peoples.
Later in the fall, Jason Calhoun, J. Vernon Luck Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, was awarded a $1.6-million grant from the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research to study multi-drug resistant infections among soldiers requiring hospitalization in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is partnering with Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Brooke Army Medical Center to build a database for multi-drug resistant infections. Calhoun will then use this information to explore how such infections can be better treated.
"Over the past three years, many of our soldiers have had open fractures where the soft tissue is injured and the bone is injured, and there is significant contamination of that tissue," Calhoun told the MU News Bureau last year.
"Many of those soldiers go on to develop severe infections of their extremities. Ultimately this research could mean fewer extremity infections, fewer surgeries and fewer amputations," he said.
In April, the University secured another major U.S. defense-related contract, a five-year deal worth up to $10 million. The arrangement will partner Shubhra Gangopadhyay and other MU College of Engineering faculty with the Picatinny Arsenal, a military installation in New Jersey, to produce nanotechnology devices that could help improve military capabilities.
A separate nanotechnology-related project, announced in June, is being led by Peter Pfeifer, an MU professor of physics. Pfeifer, along with M. Frederick Hawthorne, director of the MU International Institute for Nano and Molecular Medicine, and Carlos Wexler, associate professor of physics, will use an integrated theoretical, computational and experimental approach to develop and test hydrogen storage materials. The goal is to advance implementation of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies. It is part of a DOE hydrogen fuel initiative that gave $11.2 million to 13 projects across the nation (see page 8).
In August, David J. Schulz, an assistant professor of biological sciences, contributed an important advance in scientists' understanding of a fundamental mechanism governing cell activity. His study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that there is no standard blueprint for how many ion channels a neuron needs to do its specific task, but that there is more than one way to construct the same nerve cell.
By helping researchers better grasp the function of cells' basic building blocks, Schulz says, the finding will give researchers "a much better chance of understanding what these cells do to cope with problems they encounter."
Related Links:
U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research
