Yang Xia's Research is on the Cover of the Journal of Structural Biology

The research of Professor Yang Xia and his colleagues in the Department of Physics is featured on the cover of the October, 2008 issue of the Journal of Structural Biology. The issue contains their paper "Molecular and Morphological Adaptations in Compressed Articular Cartilage by Polarized Light Microscopy and Fourier-Transform Infrared Imaging" (J. Struct. Biol., 164:88-95, 2008). Xia's laboratory studies the microscopic structure of cartilage, how it is influenced by mechanical stress, and diseases of cartilage such as osteoarthritis. They concluded that the "depth-dependent adaptations to static loading in cartilage’s morphological structure and chemical distribution could be useful in the future studies of the early diseased cartilage." Co-author Hisham Alhadlaq is a graduate of the OU PhD program in Biomedical Sciences: Medical Physics, and co-author Farid Badar is currently a graduate student in that program.