2026-06-04 - In a publication from last fall in New Phytologist, Plant Biology Assistant Professor Rose Marks shared new research involving the resurrection plant Myrothamnus flabellifolia. The study focused on how the plant survives extreme dehydration, a trait that could help...

2026-05-28 - The College of LAS is where curiosity drives impact, and the new Curiosity to Impact (C2I) Fund helps faculty members to do exactly that.Announced in fall of 2025, the C2I Fund is part of the college’s Strategic Investment Program. Faculty members submit proposals for the creation or revision of courses, certificates, and programs. This...

2026-05-14 -  The College of Liberal Arts and Science (LAS) has honored 20 professors, researchers, and research staff members with named scholar positions and research awards in recognition of their contributions to education and learning at the University of Illinois. Amongst the 20 honored by the College of LAS, two are from the School of Integrative Biology. The awards include the LAS...

2026-04-28 - A new publication by Assistant Professor in Plant Biology Rose Marks and Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) postdoctoral fellow Shawn Abrahams is reshaping how scientists understand one of nature’s most remarkable survival strategies: the ability of some plants to dry out almost...

2026-03-30 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Some Arctic regions regain their “greenness” within a decade of a sudden permafrost collapse, while others can take a century or more to recover, researchers report in a new study. The difference is directly related to each site’s gross primary productivity, a measure of its photosynthetic capacity, the researchers discovered. This finding will allow scientists to accurately...

2026-02-24 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Counting the marginal dorsal hairs on blacklegged tick larvae would probably be a tedious affair for most people. But it is a normal day for me in the Medical Entomology Laboratory of the Illinois Natural History Survey.I need a stereomicroscope to see the hairs, which vary in...

2026-02-21 - Plant owners with a so-called green thumb often seem to have a more finely tuned sense of what their plants need than the rest of us. A new “smart lighting” system for indoor vertical farms grants this ability on a facility-wide scale, responsively meeting plants’ needs while reducing energy inefficiencies, clearing a path for indoor farms as an energy-efficient food security strategy.The system...

2026-01-20 - After nearly 15 years of dedicated leadership, Gene Robinson has stepped down as IGB Director to assume the role of Executive Director and CEO of the Discovery Partners Institute. Lisa Ainsworth, Charles Adlai Ewing Chair of Crop Physiology in the Department of Crop Sciences and the Department of Plant Biology, has agreed to serve as interim director of the IGB for the coming year.A long-time...

2025-12-12 - Eight staff members and academic professionals are being honored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences for outstanding professional contributions.Heather Lash, Kristi McDuffie, and Jamie Thomas-Ward have been selected to receive the LAS Academic Professional Award, which provides a cash award as well as a salary increment funded by LAS alumni.Kevin Armstrong, Anita Kaiser, Heidi Gnadt,...

2025-12-10 - Plant biology professor Tracy Lawson, plant biology professor emeritus Govindjee Govindjee, and the late plant biology emeritus professor Stephen P. Long were all ranked among the top seven highly-ranked...

2025-12-08 - Research by Plant Biology Professor Andrew Leakey was recently highlighted in the Chicago Tribune in a feature story examining the promise of miscanthus, a fast-growing perennial grass with wide-ranging applications. The article explores how Illinois researchers are advancing...

2025-12-03 - A team of plant biologists has made an exciting discovery about how flowers grow and organize themselves, and one of the key authors was Assistant Professor in Plant Biology Ya Min (Minya) from the University of Illinois. Their new study, published in the journal Current Biology, explores how a gene called CYCLOIDEA (CYC) helps shape...

2025-12-01 - A new study in the journal New Phytologist reveals how plants move sugar to get the energy they need to grow, even in challenging conditions. The research was led by the group of Li‑Qing Chen, Associate Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, highlighting the importance of this...

2025-10-30 - Giant, versatile, and genetically complex, miscanthus poses unique opportunities for the farm economy, domestic manufacturing, next-generation biofuels, and the environment. This ancient, highly productive, and resilient grass hails from Asia, where it thrives from the tropics of New Guinea to the cold, temperate lands of eastern Russia. Today, miscanthus is an emerging biomass crop grown on...

2025-09-18 - CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — One of the great challenges of ecology is to understand the factors that maintain, or undermine, diversity in ecosystems, researchers write in a new report in the journal Science. The researchers detail their development of a new model that — using a tree census and genomic data collected from multiple species in a forest — can predict future fluctuations in the relative...