Advances

(Advances gives a glimpse of the many significant research projects at the university. Tell us about your discoveries by e-mailing: wisweek@news.wisc.edu.)

CGI research featured at national forum
Math education research conducted at the university is getting national attention as part of the ” Decade of Behavior” initiative developed to increase public support for behavioral and social science research.

Thomas P. Carpenter and Elizabeth Fennema, along with local teachers, recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to do a presentation for lawmakers and others on the research.

The 15-plus year education research program indicates that young children enter school with a base of informal mathematical knowledge and are capable of learning more substantive mathematics than traditionally expected.

Out of this finding has evolved Cognitively Guided Instruction, a teacher professional development program that helps teachers to understand children’s mathematical thinking and to build on this knowledge in the classroom.

Data show that the CGI program results in significant changes in how teachers teach and yields significant student gains in problem-solving. This research is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.

The Decade of Behavior kickoff event in late September brought members of Congress, federal agency officials and scientists together to discuss cutting-edge social scientific and behavioral research.

Information: http://www.decadeofbehavior.org.

IRP researchers begin family capital study
An interdisciplinary team of Institute for Research on Poverty researchers from economics, sociology and social work is undertaking a three-year study of four major aspects of economic inequality: health, education, wealth and resources available to children.

The researchers will examine trends in inequality in each of these areas, which together constitute what may be called “family capital.” They will seek especially to understand the causes and consequences of the changes documented.

Co-principal investigators for the study are John Karl Scholz and Barbara Wolfe. Other investigators are Robert Hauser, Robert Haveman, John Mullahy, Stephanie Robert and Gary Sandefur.

Sweetening brazzein reveals unexpected secrets
By altering the building blocks of brazzein, a natural protein far sweeter than sugar, university scientists found a couple of changes that made it sweeter.

Six proteins in nature taste sweet to people. Scientists know the structure of three – brazzein, monellin and thaumatin, says John Markley, who directed the study. These sweet proteins show how unexpected nature’s chemistry can be.

“Nature has produced several sweet-tasting proteins and the ones whose shapes we know have dissimilar structures and DNA sequences,” says Markley. In fact each of the sweet proteins from plants appears to have evolved from different proteins with completely different roles.

As scientists rush to discover the roles of proteins that are written in plant, animal and human genes, they often look for clues to a protein’s function from its amino acid sequence.

“On the basis of brazzein’s sequence and even structure, we never would have predicted that it would taste sweet,” Markley says. “Brazzein’s sequence suggests it is similar to a plant protein that interferes with insect digestion. Its fold has similarities to that of a toxin in scorpion venom. Our research shows how important it is to study proteins in their biological context.”