Indiana University has received more than $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health to collaborate on a $12.2 million, seven-university project designed to network researchers around the country.

Indiana University dignitaries dedicated Multidisciplinary Science Building Phase II, the Bloomington campus's newest science building, in a special ceremony on Thursday. The dedication was part of October's month-long Celebrate IU initiative. IU President Michael A. McRobbie led a platform party that included members of the IU Board of Trustees, Provost Karen Hanson, College of Arts and Sciences Dean Bennett Bertenthal, School of Public and Environmental Affairs Dean John Graham, and Provost's Professor of Geological Sciences Lisa Pratt, who has also been chair of the MSB II Design and Oversight Committees. David Johnson, president and CEO of BioCrossroads, was the event's keynote speaker.

A small molecule designed to detect cyanide in water samples works quickly, is easy to use, and glows under ultraviolet or "black" light. Although the fluorescent molecule is not yet ready for market, its Indiana University Bloomington creators report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (now online) that the tool is already able to sense cyanide below the toxicity threshold established by the World Health Organization.

David Rollo, an Indiana University Bloomington biologist and Bloomington city council member, has been invited to Washington, D.C., to participate in a U.S. Department of Commerce forum on energy. The "Clean Energy Economy Forums" panel includes Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere Jane Lubchenco, among others. The two-hour forum begins at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 22, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House.

The successful Indiana Life Sciences Collaboration Conference Series will return to the Bloomington headquarters of one of the state's oldest and most successful companies, Cook Medical, for the second of its 2009-10 seminars on Friday, Nov. 13.

Indiana University's Research and Technology Corp. is moving forward with prototype development of a heart pump for infants invented through a collaboration between an IU cardiothoracic surgeon and a Purdue University engineer.

An Indiana University associate professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences has received $467,071 from the National Science Foundation to further her research into the word retrieval processes of children.

An Indiana University School of Optometry researcher and the IU spinout company she formed to develop a new diagnostic camera have both received grants from federal agencies to advance work toward preventing vision loss in diabetes patients.

Research published by a team of Indiana University bioinformaticists has shown quantitatively the influence of small sequence changes and environmental conditions on the disordered regions of a protein.

The new Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry is the first science department created on the Indiana University Bloomington campus in 33 years, and is the culmination of more than seven years of planning. The IU Trustees recently approved the department. The department is offering M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biochemistry, but does not award undergraduate degrees. Biochemistry faculty members will teach undergraduate courses, however, for their departmental allies, Biology and Chemistry.

Extra genomes appear, on average, to offer no benefit or disadvantage to plants, but still play a key role in the origin of new species, say scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and three other institutions in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Plant biologists have long suspected polyploidy -- the heritable acquisition of extra chromosome sets -- was a gateway to speciation. But the consensus was that polyploidy is a minor force, a mere anomaly that accounts for 3 or 4 percent of the world's flowers and ferns.

Indiana University Bloomington is home to the state of Indiana's first "select agent" laboratory for the study of pathogens. Select agent labs are safe and secure, and are rigorously regulated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. IU Bloomington biologist Melanie Marketon is the first scientist to use the lab.

The successful Indiana Life Sciences Collaboration Conference Series will go on the road to Warsaw, Ind. -- the "Orthopedics Capital of the World" -- for the first of its 2009-10 seminars on Friday, Sept. 11.

Evidence buried in the chromosomes of animals and plants strongly suggests only one group -- mammals -- have seen their genomes shrink after the dinosaurs' extinction. What's more, that trend continues today, say Indiana University Bloomington scientists in the first issue of a new journal, Genome Biology and Evolution.

The coevolutionary struggle between a New Zealand snail and its worm parasite makes sex advantageous for the snail, whose females favor asexual reproduction in the absence of parasites, say Indiana University Bloomington and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology biologists in this week's Current Biology. The scientists' report represents direct experimental evidence for the "Red Queen Hypothesis" of sex, which suggests sexual reproduction allows host species to avoid infection by their coevolving parasites by producing genetically variable offspring.

K-fibers, structures long thought to play a key role in the alignment of chromosomes prior to cell division, are not required after all, say Indiana University and New York State Department of Health scientists.

According to a new study by the IU Kelley School of Business and its Indiana Business Research Center, Eli Lilly and Co. contributes about $8 billion to the state's economy and is Indiana's sixth largest employer with more than 14,000 employees.

Joseph Pomerening, a cell biologist at Indiana University Bloomington, is a 2009 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, the Pew Charitable Trusts announced today (June 16). The honor is accompanied by a four-year, $240,000 award to support research and is reserved for early career scientists.

Indiana University Bloomington biologist Mike Wade has been selected to receive the American Society of Naturalists' 2009 Sewall Wright Award. Named after the influential population geneticist, the award recognizes a "senior but still active investigator who is making fundamental contributions to ... promoting the conceptual unification the biological sciences," according to the society.

In 1979 Chancellor's Professor David Pisoni brought the first two postdoctoral researchers to Indiana University Bloomingrton when he was awarded a five-year training grant by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders. Today, the same grant supports six postdoctoral researchers, six doctoral students and six medical students in Bloomington and Indianapolis.

About 800 participants from around the world will be in Bloomington this week for the 21st American Peptide Society Symposium, a forum for exchanging cutting-edge developments in biotechnology. The program consists of scientific opinion leaders from academia with keynote lectures from two pharmaceutical CEOs and two CSOs, as well as a collective of other executives from the pharmaceutical and venture capital sectors. Indiana University Bloomington biochemist Richard DiMarchi is co-chairing the event.

With one in five people in the U.S. speaking a language other than English when at home, Tessa Bent's research into how children perceive so many different varieties of foreign-accented English has never been more timely. Recognizing the importance of understanding how children may or may not overcome foreign-accented speech variables, the National Institutes of Health has made Bent, an assistant professor in the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, one of the first IU faculty members to receive grant funds through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

During a period when auto industry employment in Indiana and elsewhere has been in decline, the Hoosier state's life sciences firms have accounted for nearly a quarter of the jobs created during this decade.

Bill Cook, founder of Cook Group Inc. and an early innovator in Indiana's life sciences industry, will be the keynote speaker at the fourth and final event in the 2008-09 Indiana Life Sciences Collaboration Conference Series.

The National Institutes of Health has approved a $1.2 million, four-year grant that will allow Indiana University Bloomington scientists to continue their study of Huntington's disease. The project, led by IU Bloomington structural biologist Joel Ybe, has focused on the interaction of two proteins, HIP1 (Huntingtin-interacting protein 1) and HIPPI (HIP1-protein interactor), whose association is believed to trigger the death of nervous system cells.