URBANA, Ill. - Sharon Donovan, professor and Melissa M. Noel Endowed Chair in Diet and Health at University of Illinois, will assume the role of director of the newly established Personalized Nutrition Initiative (PNI).

The PNI is a partnership between the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at U of I.

URBANA, Ill. – Food additives get a bad rap, but a natural ingredient from orange peels and apple skins, pectin, is a thickener safely added to many food products, most notably jellies. The additive is also the subject of a University of Illinois experiment highlighting both the power and the challenges of public-private partnerships in university research.

URBANA, Ill. – Genetically speaking, the loaf of bread you stress-baked during the COVID-19 shutdown is more complex than you think. Wheat’s 16 billion genes, organized in not one but three semi-independent genomes, can overlap or substitute for one another, making things extremely tricky for geneticists trying to enhance desirable traits in the world’s most widely grown crop.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers often study the genomes of individual organisms to try to tease out the relationship between genes and behavior. A new study of Africanized honey bees reveals, however, that the genetic inheritance of individual bees has little influence on their propensity for aggression. Instead, the genomic traits of the hive as a whole are strongly associated with how fiercely its soldiers attack.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The crops we grow in the field often form dense canopies with many overlapping leaves, such that young “sun leaves” at the top of the canopy are exposed to full sunlight with older “shade leaves” at the bottom. In order to maximize photosynthesis, resource-use efficiency, and yield, sun leaves typically maximize photosynthetic efficiency at high light, while shade leaves maximize efficiency at low light. 

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Northern bobwhites are attracted to a habitat based on whether other bobwhites are present there, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report. This phenomenon, called conspecific attraction, could aid conservation efforts.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. – Like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, some herbicide-resistant weeds can’t be killed by available chemicals. The problem affects more than just the errant weed in our driveways; herbicide-resistant weeds threaten our food supply, stealing resources and outcompeting the crops that make up our breakfast cereal and feed the nation’s livestock.

The weed that represents the biggest threat to Midwestern corn and soybean production, waterhemp, has outsmarted almost every kind of herbicide on the market today.

URBANA, Ill. – Soil microbes are living, working barometers of soil health. They are responsible for turning atmospheric nitrogen into forms plants can use, and for releasing nitrogen back into the air. Farm management decisions undoubtedly affect these microscopic workhorses, but, until now, scientists didn’t have a full picture of how crop rotation and tillage influence the soil microbiome.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — From tweeting photos of delicious meals to reviewing restaurants, social media give foodies numerous opportunities to indulge their passion for edibles. But these media and other digital communications — including recipe websites and food-delivery apps — also generate a rich trove of text data for food scientists and food industry researchers to study what people eat, how nutrition affects health and many other food-related topics. Read more from Illinois News Bureau.

URBANA, Ill. – Recent regulatory restrictions around antibiotic use in livestock challenge the feed industry, but research from the University of Illinois shows a probiotic product – Clostridium butyricum – can achieve the same growth-promoting results as antibiotics.