KANSAS CITY, MO — This weekend on KSHB 41, you can catch the American Century Championship golf tournament live from Lake Tahoe.
Stars from TV, film, and other sports will face off at Edgewood Golf Course, including Travis and Jason Kelce.
And once again this year, the Stowers Institute for Medical Research right here in Kansas City is one of the primary beneficiaries of proceeds from the tournament. So I went to their labs to see some of the work done inside.
One really cool example--coral.
Stowers is home to a collection of coral that they've actually been able to reproduce. It's one of the only facilities in the country that has been successful in that pursuit, because the coral only spawns once a year, under extremely specific circumstances.
I talked to Dr. Matt Gibson, who runs that lab at Stowers, about the work that his team is doing.
“What we have at Stowers are computationally controlled environmental units that trick our corals into thinking it's July 21st full moon, or whatever it is, at the right time, and that triggers them to make sperm and eggs,” Gibson said. “So we've been able to spawn them and get them to reproduce sexually and make successive generations, using that approach."
Dr. Gibson went on to explain to me how the ramifications of better understanding coral's reproduction, and environmental sensitivity, could go a long way toward protecting the planet’s coral population. You can learn more about his work here.
But that’s just one type of research being done at Stowers Institute.
Dr. Alexander Garruss is using artificial intelligence to pour through massive sets of data related to the RNA in our bodies.
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a molecule that does a million different jobs. But when we manufacture RNAs that we don't need or want, that's when Garruss tells me that things like disease show up.
His team uses AI to go through trillions of variables with a simple goal--try to better understand not only what may go wrong in our bodies, but when it started, why, and maybe even how to fix it.
"Almost all disease, and things that are going right in your body, have everything to do with turning genes on and off at the right time, and in the right place,” Garruss tells me.
“Disease is just an extension of that--you might have the wrong thing activated at the wrong place. And illuminating that space gives us a lot more hope for what we can go after, and what we can do."
Dr. Garruss, was just named one of the first Jim and Virginia Stowers Fellows at the institute, and his work is largely about casting ahead decades into the future. Learn more here.
I also got the chance to speak with Dr. Kamena Kostova about her research on ribosomes, which build the proteins in every cell of your body.
Proteins, Kostova tells me, are the building blocks that fit into your DNA, and make you, you. They can be good, or bad, depending on how your body regulates them, or fails to.
She and her team are using zebrafish, housed in lab space at Stowers Institute, to try and answer what happens when ribosomes break down.
"If a factory doesn't work, it can be a problem,” Kostova says. “Because now you don't produce as much of what you need, or maybe you start producing something that's defective. But because there are so many factories, it's very difficult to tell which one is working, and which one is broken. What we have figured out is how to label ribosomes that are defective, and how to identify them."
Dr. Kostova's work is being recognized nationally as well. She just won a highly competitive award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. You can learn more about her work here.
The second and third rounds of the American Century Championship will air on Saturday and Sunday from 1:30 to 5PM on KSHB 41.
The Stowers Institute has been the primary beneficiary of that tournament multiple times.
