Duke Research

Happy Pi Day! Ingrid Daubechies, a distinguished mathematician, created a special cookie cutter to make perfectly tessellated sugar cookies to mark 3/14. View the video at duke.is/zbsg7

Beautiful bacteria 🧽 🧫
•
•

Duke Researchers have uncovered a basic but surprising fact: your kitchen sponge is a better incubator for diverse bacterial communities than a laboratory Petri dish. But it’s not just the trapped leftovers that make the cornucopia of microbes swarming around so happy and productive, it’s the structure of the sponge itself.
•
•
These different species of bacteria — each engineered to glow a different color so researchers can track their growth — are thriving in harmony with one another thanks to their structured environment. Credit: Lingchong You, Duke University

International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022
•
•
Emily Bernhardt, Ph.D. samples New Hope Creek with her lab to gather critical, continuous data about our fresh waterways. In the past this type of data was collected once a year. Using sensors in the water all year long allows her lab to see variations with seasons, floods and droughts. She likens her work to “fitbits for rivers and streams”.
•
•

A “cancer rainbow” mouse 🌈
•
•
•
A ”cancer rainbow” mouse being used by Joshua Snyder’s Cancer Initiation and Cancer Cell Behavior Lab at Duke University highlights different versions of the crucial HER2 gene and may help explain different outcomes in HER2-positive human breast cancers.
•
Their work (Ginzel, Acharya, and Lubkov et al.) shows that each version of HER2 (shown by different colors) is associated with early changes to epithelial cell fate, tumor growth rate and invasiveness. This image is the October cover of Molecular Cancer Research.
•