UI genomics facility closer to being renamed for Woese

Photo by: The News-Gazette

The late Carl Woese.

On Monday, a proposal to rename the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology after a renowned and longtime university scientist received a green light from the Senate Executive Committee.

The new name, pending additional approvals, is the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

The UI's seven-year-old Institute for Genomic Biology, located near the historic Morrow Plots, is an interdisciplinary center home to genomics research. Woese was a founding member.

Woese, who is credited with discovering a third domain of life, was a microbiology professor who spent his entire academic career at the UI. He died in late December 2012.

Woese's "seminal discovery" rewrote biology textbooks, said the institute's director, Gene Robinson.

Before Woese, it was believed there were two domains of life: bacteria/microbes and everything else.

"He made the discovery by pulling some microbes out of an Illinois cow ... and looking at them very carefully with a new kind of microscope, a genetic microscope to sequence the genomes of these bugs. He looked up from his microscope and said, 'These don't look like any other microbes we've seen. They're not related to the microbes we've seen before.' People said that can't be case."

But Woese pushed on with his work, named this new group "archaea" and now any modern biology textbook says there are three domains of life, Robinson said.

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UI genomics facility closer to being renamed for Woese