News
Worms as a model for personalized medicine
Tailoring a person’s diet or medicine based on their genomes has been a goal of the medical community for decades, but the strategy has not been widely successful because people metabolize chemicals differently. A drug may work differently for two patients because...
Phosphate biosensors could lead to more efficient fertilizer usage
Shiqi Zhang spent many months sitting alone in a dark room, staring intently into the lens of a confocal microscope as she focused a laser beam on plant cells mounted on a glass slide. She was measuring changes in the intensity of fluorescent light emitted by the...
The missing links: Finding function in lincRNAs
Genomes contain regions between protein-coding genes that produce lengthy RNA molecules that never give rise to a protein. These long intergenic non-coding RNAs (lincRNAs) are thought to have important functions, such as regulating responses to environmental...
Wild tomato genome will benefit domesticated cousins
Wild relatives of crops are becoming increasingly valuable to plant researchers and breeders. During the process of domestication, crops tend to lose many genes, but wild relatives often retain genes that could be useful – such as genes that confer resistance to...
New species of alga named for poet Amanda Gorman
“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.” – Amanda Gorman, from “The Hill We Climb.” In 2020, a group of researchers in Fay-Wei Li’s lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) had done what many scientists dream of...
BTI Welcomes Summer Student Interns
On May 31, Boyce Thompson Institute welcomed 41 of the country’s brightest undergraduate students from universities around the country to experience the life of a researcher for 10 weeks. Ten more research interns from local area high schools will join the...
Congratulations to BTI’s Spring 2022 Graduates!
We are pleased to announce that three BTI researchers received their degrees during the Cornell University commencement ceremony on May 28. Congratulations to our newest alumni! Alex Ogbonna, Mueller lab, PhD in Plant Breeding & Genetics, Dissertation title:...
Sheila Ochugboju Named Executive Director of Alliance for Science
Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) is pleased to welcome Sheila Ochugboju as the new Executive Director of the Alliance for Science (AfS), a global communications initiative dedicated to promoting access to scientific innovation as a means of enhancing food security,...
BTI’s Greg Martin Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Greg Martin, Boyce Schulze Downey Professor at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) at Cornell University, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Martin is one of 150 new members announced on...
New software to help discover valuable compounds
As a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of BTI faculty member Frank Schroeder, Max Helf saw his labmates continually struggle when they were analyzing data. So, he decided to do something about it and developed a free, open-source app called Metaboseek,...