Scientists are still uncovering new medicinal uses of plants, looking for new and improved therapeutics. Assistant Professor Josh Vermaas has been awarded a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award, or MIRA, from the National Institutes of Health to do just this. The grant, totaling approximately $1.8 million, will support research in Vermaas’s lab for five years.

“Plants are essential to human health, and that is why NIH thinks that this research is valuable,” Vermaas explained. Vermaas has appointments with the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory and the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology.

The Vermaas lab uses computational biology tools to look at how plants work on a molecular level. This molecular picture allows researchers to project how chemicals may interact with human biology and also provides clues as to how to produce promising therapeutics cost-effectively.