GlobeNewswire: Morgridge Institute for Research Contains the last 10 of 19 releaseshttp://www.globenewswire.com/External?Length=42024-03-28T17:40:37ZGlobeNewswirehttp://www.globenewswire.com/External?Length=4newsdesk@globenewswire.com (NewsDesk)https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/03/19/1757393/0/en/Have-microscope-will-travel-New-tech-project-links-Madison-Boston-scientists.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Have microscope, will travel: New tech project links Madison, Boston scientists2019-03-19T20:09:54Z<![CDATA[Madison, March 19, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- An invention designed to transform how and where high-powered research microscopes are deployed — and who gets to use them — will make its way from Madison this spring to the fertile biology labs of greater Boston.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/08/20/1554116/0/en/Want-to-fight-cyber-threats-Start-with-clean-code.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Want to fight cyber threats? Start with clean code2018-08-20T16:37:38Z<![CDATA[Madison, Wis., Aug. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Barton Miller has a surprise for his University of Wisconsin-Madison class of 250 software programming undergraduates this fall: No code assignment is complete until it's declared weakness-free by a suite of software analysis tools."You're not going to get extra points," he says. "It's just that you can turn in your code only when it comes through clean."That may sound stringent, but Miller is confident it won't be such a chore. His students will be directed to the Software Assurance Marketplace, or SWAMP, a powerful software assurance platform designed to make the detection of potential software weakness as quick and painless as possible.The SWAMP offers more than 30 open-source and commercial static code analysis tools fully integrated into its automated platform. Leading commercial tool providers in the SWAMP include Synopsys, Parasoft, and GrammaTech, all household names with programmers."For the students, using the SWAMP is to feel the freedom that they are not handcuffed to a single tool," Miller says, likening the SWAMP experience to taking multiple medications to manage a chronic disease. "Each medication may not solve the whole problem, but it may have a strength that other medications don't have."Launched five years ago, the SWAMP is now coming into its own as a free, portable, one-stop source for programmers to tighten up their code - and, in turn, shore up the most frequent target of cyberattacks. The project is funded by the Department of Homeland Security and is led by the Morgridge Institute for Research in close collaboration with partners at UW-Madison, Indiana University, and the University of Illinois.Miller's classroom experiment represents an important front for the SWAMP as it aims to advance continuous assurance on software security. Software assurance is for the most part missing from the undergraduate coding curriculum and is often relegated to separate security-based courses. Miller, a UW-Madison computer science professor and chief scientist of the SWAMP, says the goal is to create "turnkey resources" such as video tutorials for computer science instructors to plug it into their courses.Experience gained this fall from Miller's course will be used as a blueprint for integrating software assurance into lecture-size coding courses at other institutions. The SWAMP platform was designed to support "scaling-out" in support of wide-scale usage.Miron Livny, SWAMP director and chief technology officer, says that partnering with the educational community is key because the software security challenge has strong behavioral elements that need to be addressed in the beginning stages of software development teaching. Raising awareness early among future developers, and providing integrated tools like the SWAMP, will help make software assurance a continuous activity in the software life-cycle.Von Welch, director of Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and SWAMP chief information security officer, says the greatest contribution of the SWAMP has been to provide empowerment in what seems like an unwinnable scenario."The whole ecosystem of software has just exploded with iPhones and Android phones and software doing a lot for our lives these days," he says. "It's easy to be sort of abstractly aware of the security challenge, but we're giving developers a tool to do something concrete about it."The project also yielded an application called "SWAMP-in-a-Box," which enables developers to deploy the platform locally on their private network to address security and privacy concerns. In 2018 to date, more than 34,000 software assessments have been run in the SWAMP, covering hundreds of millions of lines of code.Companies and organizations also have been active in the SWAMP. Partners on specialized assurance projects include the Department of Defense, defense contractors, and commercial companies certifying software.Cyberattacks are only getting worse as software proliferates into every corner of life. Operating systems that once could support a few thousand applications can now support as many as 3 million. Things got remarkably bad in 2017 with 159,700 cyberattacks targeting businesses -nearly doubling the previous year's total, according to the Online Trust Alliance.One example from last year serves as a "poster child" for business catastrophe, Miller says. Dutch-based Maersk Shipping, representing almost one-fifth of all the world's cargo shipping, was hit with the "NotPetya" ransomware virus that wiped out all 45,000 of the company's computers. The result snarled global shipping traffic and cost the company $300 million in repairs. "One of the challenges in cybersecurity right now is the attackers get unlimited attempts," adds Welch. "Cyber attackers have this sort of invulnerability and anonymity and they're doing it from across the world. When they keep attacking, it's like the idea of monkeys typing randomness until they eventually produce Shakespeare."]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/07/10/1535222/0/en/Finding-a-weak-link-in-the-frightful-parasite-Schistosoma.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Finding a weak link in the frightful parasite Schistosoma2018-07-10T12:00:00Z<![CDATA[Madison, Wis., July 10, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The parasitic disease schistosomiasis is one of the developing world’s worst public health scourges, affecting hundreds of millions of people, yet only a single, limited treatment exists to combat the disease.Researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research are searching for potential new targets by probing the cellular and developmental biology of its source, the parasitic flatworm Schistosoma.The team’s newest work, published today in the journal eLife, sheds light on essential stages in the life cycle of this blood fluke. They characterized several different types of stem cells that govern the parasite's complex life cycle and also identified a gene associated with the earliest development of the germline, from which gametes form."Understanding how these stem cells drive the development of each life-cycle stage may ultimately help prevent disease transmission," says senior author Phillip Newmark, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Morgridge investigator and professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.More than 250 million people, mostly in Africa and Asia, have schistosomiasis. The World Health Organization classifies it as the deadliest neglected tropical disease, killing an estimated 280,000 people each year. Children with the disease are often ravaged by anemia, malnutrition and pervasive learning disabilities.The drug Praziquantel is the primary form of treatment. The drug is largely effective in killing the adult worms in humans, but not in the parasite’s other life cycle stages, leaving people exposed to continual reinfection.Schistosomes have a complicated life cycle, switching through many different body plans as they move from snails to water to humans. The cycle begins in tainted freshwater lakes and ponds, where parasite eggs released from human waste hatch into tiny creatures whose sole task is to infect a specific type of snail.Within the snail host, the parasite produces massive numbers of offspring called cercariae. These fast-swimming, fork-tailed organisms are released into the water, from which they burrow through human skin and cause infection.After penetrating host skin, the parasites must migrate into the blood vessels and find their way to the major vein that supplies the liver. During this journey, the parasites reorganize their tissues, and upon reaching the liver, begin developing reproductive organs, pair with a mate, and grow into mature adults.The team examined the poorly understood early stages after infection through an ingenious experiment designed by co-author Jayhun “Jay” Lee, a Morgridge Postdoctoral Fellow in the Newmark Lab. He mimicked infection in a culture dish by enabling cercariae to penetrate through a portion of mouse skin into a medium on the other side. This strategy allowed him to examine when and which cells first begin to divide after infection.“We don’t get that many ah-ha moments in our lives as scientists,” Newmark says. “This was one of them.”During the initial 22-36 hours of infection, they observed five distinct cells proliferating; these same stem cells were packed into the cercariae during development inside the snail. The cells give rise to the adult stem cells, initiating development of the parasite into the adult worm. From there, they identified a subset of stem cells associated with development of the reproductive system.“We’re really excited about this because it opens up a number of important research directions,” Newmark says. “The drug used to fight schistosomes does not work on this stage of infection. Understanding what’s happening in this early period after infection is critical, because it’s also a time when the parasites should be most vulnerable.”Lee says the next research step will be to follow these five stem cells as they continue to differentiate and form tissues. “We want to use this as a road map to figure out what the cells are doing,” he says.The Newmark Lab’s primary focus has been on exploring regeneration in planarians — remarkable flatworms that can regenerate from the tiniest body fragments. They started work on schistosomes, "evil cousins" of planarians, in 2009 and applied decades of planarian biology to better understand their parasitic relatives.It’s a case where model organism research may help provide answers for a human health tragedy. “This provides another example of how curiosity-driven basic research can lead to unanticipated outcomes and why it is important to support such work,” Newmark says.This work was conducted together with Bo Wang and colleagues at Stanford University and the University of Chicago. It was supported by the Newmark HHMI Investigator Award and by awards from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Beckman Foundation.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/02/28/1401131/0/en/With-SWAMP-in-a-Box-Bring-Your-Own-License-and-turbo-charge-software-assurance.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624With SWAMP-in-a-Box, ‘Bring Your Own License’ and turbo-charge software assurance2018-02-28T12:00:00Z<![CDATA[Madison, Wis., Feb. 28, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In the drive to reduce software security flaws, the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP) project has enhanced its portable platform that brings a comprehensive suite of software assurance tools to the programmer’s desktop.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/12/21/1269116/0/en/Madison-based-SWAMP-and-Synopsys-join-forces-to-educate-the-future-cybersecurity-workforce.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Madison-based SWAMP and Synopsys join forces to educate the future cybersecurity workforce2017-12-21T16:09:50Z<![CDATA[The Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP) has partnered with Synopsys, an industry leader in software security and quality, to expand its suite of assurance tools in support of the academic community.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/12/13/1261683/0/en/Three-papers-help-to-crack-the-code-of-coenzyme-Q-biosynthesis.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Three papers help to crack the code of coenzyme Q biosynthesis2017-12-13T21:41:25Z<![CDATA[Madison, Wis., Dec. 13, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Coenzyme Q (CoQ) is a vital cog in the body’s energy-producing machinery, a kind of chemical gateway in the conversion of food into cellular fuel. But six decades removed from its discovery, scientists still can’t describe exactly how and when it is made.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/07/10/1042197/0/en/Stem-cell-advance-brings-bioengineered-arteries-closer-to-reality.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Stem cell advance brings bioengineered arteries closer to reality2017-07-10T19:00:00Z<![CDATA[Stem cell biologists have tried unsuccessfully for years to produce cells that will give rise to functional arteries and give physicians new options to combat cardiovascular disease, the world’s leading cause of death.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/06/27/1029493/0/en/Morgridge-scientists-illuminate-structures-vital-to-virus-replication.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Morgridge scientists illuminate structures vital to virus replication2017-06-27T12:15:00Z<![CDATA[Madison, WI, June 27, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In the fight against the viruses that invade everyday life, seeing and understanding the battleground is essential. Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research have, for the first time, imaged molecular structures vital to how a major class of viruses replicates within infected cells.]]>Pictured is a 3-D rendering of a virus RNA replication spherule. The mitochondrial outer membrane is in dark blue, the spherule membrane in white, the interior spherule RNA density in red, and the spherule crown aperture in light blue.Pictured is a cryo-electron tomography image of a mitochondrion associated with virus RNA replication spherules. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/11/15/890301/10166001/en/Can-artery-banks-transform-vascular-medicine.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624Can artery 'banks' transform vascular medicine?2016-11-15T19:42:55Z<![CDATA[New Morgridge, UW project investigates tissue-engineered arteries for transplant MADISON, Wis., Nov. 15, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The prospect of creating artery "banks" available for cardiovascular surgery, bypassing the need to harvest vessels from the patient, could transform treatment of many common heart and vascular ailments.]]>https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2016/10/13/879300/10165597/en/SWAMP-in-a-Box-an-on-premises-continuous-software-assurance-capability.html?f=22&fvtc=4&fvtv=26624'SWAMP-in-a-Box,' an on-premises continuous software assurance capability2016-10-13T13:11:09Z<![CDATA[MADISON, Wis., Oct. 13, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP) project has launched a new version of its continuous assurance technologies that will allow the software assurance community to deploy local (private) instances of the SWAMP. This version augments the services provided by the public SWAMP facility that has been in operation for the past three years.]]>