WATER AND LIFE INTERFACE INSTITUTE
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    • Mission, Vision, Values
    • Institute Themes & Structure
    • Team
    • Code of Conduct
    • Scientific Advisory Board
    • Researcher Spotlight
    • Contact Us
  • Research
    • Overview
    • Surviving the Solid State
    • Rehydration & Recovery
    • Molecular Engineering
    • Evolutionary Dynamics
    • Integration of Themes
  • Training
    • Overview
    • Summer Internship Program
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  • Outreach
    • Overview
    • Seed Germination Necklace
    • Seed Longevity Experiments
    • Tardigrade Hunting
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    • Training

About WALII

WALII seeks to understand how
life can persist without water
by elucidating how molecules, cells,
and organisms protect themselves
​during desiccation and rehydration.
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The Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII), a National Science Foundation-funded Biology Integration Institute, was established to study how life interacts with water from the molecular to the organismal level across plants, fungi, and animals. We study this interaction in four integrated themes: the physical and molecular determinants that allow organisms to survive in the solid state (Theme 1); rehydration responses in desiccation tolerant and desiccation sensitive systems (Theme 2); molecular grammar of desiccation tolerance conferred by intrinsically disordered proteins (Theme 3); and short- and long-term evolutionary history of desiccation tolerance (Theme 4).

​WALII includes team members with diverse expertise ranging from biophysics to plant biology and experience with several desiccation tolerant and sensitive systems. Our long-term goal is to understand how organisms can tolerate desiccation, invent technologies and concepts to study anhydrobiosis, engineer macromolecules, cells, and organisms that can survive desiccation, and produce the next generation of leaders in all sectors of our society.
Research
Training
Outreach

WaLII Organizational ChART

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MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
“WALII operates in part out of
Michigan State University. We acknowledge that Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of the Anishinaabeg – the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. We affirm Indigenous sovereignty and hold Michigan State University accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.”
National Science Foundation logo.
WALII is funded by NSF DBI grant #2213983
  • Home
  • About
    • Mission, Vision, Values
    • Institute Themes & Structure
    • Team
    • Code of Conduct
    • Scientific Advisory Board
    • Researcher Spotlight
    • Contact Us
  • Research
    • Overview
    • Surviving the Solid State
    • Rehydration & Recovery
    • Molecular Engineering
    • Evolutionary Dynamics
    • Integration of Themes
  • Training
    • Overview
    • Summer Internship Program
  • Careers
  • Events
  • Outreach
    • Overview
    • Seed Germination Necklace
    • Seed Longevity Experiments
    • Tardigrade Hunting
  • Publications
  • Resources
    • Training