Research spearheaded by Dr. Reine Protacio, Staff Scientist in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UAMS, was recently highlighted in the journal Science. A full-length NEWS article describes how Protacio discovered that some batches of Agar—which is used to solidify solutions of nutrients in petri plates—were killing the fission yeast cells that the laboratory uses to study how chromosomes behave during cell divisions.
The original research article, published as a preprint in bioRxiv, was co-authored by Drs. Mari Davidson (UAMS), Wayne Wahls (UAMS) and Dominique Helmlinger (University of Montpellier in France).