News from Around Campus

• CGSI is a partner in the new Wisconsin Nathan Shock Center of Excellence to study the biology of aging.
• CGSI faculty member Jason Peters and lab are developing new genomic tools for bacterial innovations in biofuel production.
• Dr. Jiacheng Miao, former PhD student from CGSI affiliate Qiongshi Lu’s lab, was awarded the NOMIS & Science Young Explorer Award and talked about his work at UW-Madison in Science magazine.
• Dr. Muhammed Murtaza, Director of the Center for Precision Medicine and CGSI affiliate, was highlighted for his genomic work on breast cancer diagnostics and treatment.
• CGSI affiliate Professor Melissa Harrison and Professor Peter Lewis were highlighted for their work using Drosophila genomics to study pediatric brain cancer.

Publication Highlights

• Leah Escalante and colleagues in the Gasch Lab discovered the role of Ribosome Quality Control defects in premature aging caused by chromosomal aneuploidy.  PLoS Biology. Nov 2025.
• Genomic analysis across copepod species, known for their ability to rapidly invade new habitats, shows evolution of genomic architecture in work from Carol E. Lee’s lab.  Nature Communications. Nov 2025. 
• Graduate student Cody Martin and CGSI affiliates Anthony Gitter and Karthik Anantharaman developed a new protein language model to study virus diversity.  Nature Communications. Nov 2025.
• By analyzing single-cell RNA-seq data, a collaborative team led by Daifeng Wang identified druggable transcription factors to treat psychiatric disorders.  Cell Genomics.  Nov 2025.
• The Kendziorski lab and colleagues developed a new multi-agent large-language model for annotating cell types from single-cell RNA-seq data.  Nature Communications. Dec 2025.
• Collaborative work by Sushmita Roy, Nancy Keller, and Jean-Michele Ane’s labs developed a tool to explore Gene Regulation of Aspergillus fumigatus called GRAsp. Nucleic Acids Research. Jan 2026.
• Genomic analysis in Matt Anderson’s lab explores genome recombination and chromosome shuffling due to parasex in virulent Candida albicans strains.  Nature Microbiology.  Jan 2026. 

• Congratulations to Dr. Paige Henning of the Sussman lab for winning the Paul Boyer Postdoctoral Award from the Biochemistry Department!