Emergency room doctors often have only a few minutes to determine which patients are in need of a blood transfusion. But currently doctors have no direct method to assess the health of one of the most critical component of the blood: platelets. These tiny blood cells play a huge role in helping blood clot after an injury. Now researchers at…
Mechanosensory hair cells of the zebrafish lateral line regenerate rapidly following damage. These renewed hair cells arise from the proliferation of surrounding support cells, which undergo symmetric division to produce two hair cell daughters. Given the continued regenerative capacity of the lateral line, support cells presumably have the ability to replenish themselves. Utilizing novel transgenic lines, we identified support cell…
If you ask Christof Koch, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, how close we are to understanding our own brains, he scoffs. “We don’t even understand the brain of a worm,” Koch said. The lab roundworm, more technically known as Caenorhabditis elegans, houses 302 neurons and 7,000 connections between those neurons in its microscopic body. Researchers have…
In the United States, black men and women jointly comprise only 5 percent of the nation’s science and engineering fields, according to the National Science Foundation. As white men occupy around 50 percent of occupations in this field, and white women occupy an additional 18 percent, the stark differences in statistics show a lack of diverse representation in the sciences. In…
Preterm birth (PTB) complications are the leading cause of long-term morbidity and mortality in children. By using whole blood samples, we integrated whole-genome sequencing (WGS), RNA sequencing (RNA-seq), and DNA methylation data for 270 PTB and 521 control families. We analyzed this combined dataset to identify genomic variants associated with PTB and secondary analyses to identify variants associated with very…
Dr. Heather J. Wright, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Hingorani Lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has received a prestigious three-year training fellowship from the National Institutes of Health to study the mechanisms of pancreatic cancer spread, or metastasis, to distant organs. The NIH established the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship, otherwise known as an…
Vikram Jandhyala, the University of Washington’s vice provost for innovation and a key link between the UW and the Seattle region’s technology community, has died as a result of suicide, according to a statement this afternoon by Ana Mari Cauce, the University of Washington president. Jandhyala, 47, led the UW’s innovation center, CoMotion, for five years. Earlier this year, he announced that he…
Eight researchers at the University of Washington have been named Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows, according to an announcement Feb. 28 by the Washington Research Foundation. This is the second year for the WRF’s program supporting postdoctoral researchers. An external committee from academia and industry chose the Fellows from a pool of candidates to conduct original research, primarily in the life sciences, at Washington state research…
The oral blood thinner Xarelto (rivaroxaban) significantly reduced blood clots for high-risk patients with cancer being treated in the outpatient setting, according to results from the CASSINI trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Blood clots are really common in cancer patients. They can happen before the diagnosis, they can actually lead to the diagnosis of cancer, but most commonly…
Quantitative modeling is useful for predicting behaviors of a system and for rationally constructing or modifying the system. The predictive power of a model relies on accurate quantification of model parameters. Here, we illustrate challenges in parameter quantification and offer means to overcome these challenges, using a case example in which we quantitatively predict the growth rate of a cooperative…
