Recent News
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Studies Reveal How Cells Distinguish Between Disease-Causing and Innocuous Invaders
The specific mechanisms by which humans and other animals are able to discriminate between disease-causing microbes and innocuous ones in order to rapidly respond to infections have long been a mystery to scientists. But a study conducted on roundworms by biologists at UC San Diego has uncovered some important clues to finally answering that question.
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Nick Spitzer on KPBS Midday Edition: Thursday, March 15
Which of the following statements are true? We only use 10 percent of our brain. Listening to classical music can make us smarter. Brain damage is permanent. Alcohol kills brain cells. If you’ve said none, congratulations. If you said one or more, read on.
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San Diego’s Algal Biofuels Research Enterprise Continues Rapid Growth
Despite the sluggish economy, San Diego’s research efforts to produce new transportation fuels from algae continue to grow at a rapid pace, generating more than double the number of jobs for local workers in 2011 than were available in the region just two years ago.
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Researchers Create Living ‘Neon Signs’ Composed of Millions of Glowing Bacteria
In an example of life imitating art, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego have created a living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs.
Their achievement, detailed in this week’s advance online issue of the journal Nature, involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the biological clocks of the bacteria, synchronizing the clocks of the thousands of bacteria within a colony, then synchronizing thousands of the blinking bacterial colonies to glow on and off in unison.
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Jim Posakony Named 2011 AAAS Fellow
Professor Jim Posakony is one of nine faculty members at UC San Diego named 2011 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest scientific organization. He and UC San Diego professors Alexandra Newton, Joseph O’Connor, Carol Padden, Dena Plemmons, Michael Sailor, Lu Jeu Sham, Lisa Tauxe and Paul Yu were among 539 individuals selected this year by colleagues in their disciplines to be honored by the association for “efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished.”
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Fire Ants’ Spread Aided by Partnership With Other Insects
The spread of fire ants from Argentina in the United States has been aided by their partnership with local insects, according to a paper published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Professor David Holway and colleagues from Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Illinois.
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Ananda Goldrath named Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar
Associate Professor Ananda Goldrath has been named a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar. She will receive a research award of $110,000 per year from the society for the next five years for her study on the Transcriptional Control of Lymphocyte Differentiation and Transformation. Goldrath received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School, where she was the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation-Irvington Fellow. She is also a Pew Scholar.
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Founding Biologist at UC San Diego Dies at 89
Stanley Eli Mills, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and one of its founding faculty members, died Friday, November 25 following a Thanksgiving evening automobile accident in San Diego. He was 89.
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Biologists Use Algae-Produced Protein in Global Health Initiative
A research team in the Division of Biological Sciences headed by Stephen Mayfield will produce a mammary gland protein called MAA from algae to determine if has the potential to significantly reduce infectious diarrheal diseases, a major cause of infant mortality in the developing world.
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Worms Reveal Secrets of Wound Healing Response
The lowly and simple roundworm may be the ideal laboratory model to learn more about the complex processes involved in repairing wounds and could eventually allow scientists to improve the body’s response to healing skin wounds, a serious problem in diabetics and the elderly.
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Do Bacteria Age? Biologists Discover the Answer Follows Simple Economics
When a bacterial cell divides into two daughter cells and those two cells divide into four more daughters, then 8, then 16 and so on, the result, biologists have long assumed, is an eternally youthful population of bacteria. Bacteria, in other words, don’t age–at least not in the same way all other organisms do.
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UC San Diego Biologists Unravel How Plants Synthesize Their Growth Hormone
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have succeeded in unraveling, for the first time, the complete chain of biochemical reactions that controls the synthesis of auxin, the hormone that regulates nearly all aspects of plant growth and development.
Their discovery, detailed in a paper in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will allow agricultural scientists to develop new ways to enhance or manipulate auxin production to improve the growth and yield of crops and other plants.
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UC San Diego Biologists Discover Genes That Repair Nerves After Injury
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have identified more than 70 genes that play a role in regenerating nerves after injury, providing biomedical researchers with a valuable set of genetic leads for use in developing therapies to repair spinal cord injuries and other common kinds of nerve damage such as stroke.
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Old-growth rainforests must be saved for tropical biodiversity
A team of researchers from Singapore, Australia, Switzerland, the UK and the USA has carried out a comprehensive assessment to estimate the impact of disturbance and land conversion on biodiversity in tropical forests. In a recent study published in Nature, they found that primary forests – those least disturbed old-growth forests – sustain the highest levels of biodiversity and are vital to many tropical species.
Rampant rates of logging and agricultural expansion have transformed the world's tropical forests, leaving little remaining primary forests unaltered by humans. The value of these rapidly expanding degraded and converted forest landscapes is hotly debated, and was the subject of the study.
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Biofuels Certificate Program Trains Workers for New Jobs in State's Green Economy
The first 50 graduates of an innovative program funded by the State of California to retrain workers for the new green economy received their certification today to work as general science technicians in the rapidly expanding biofuels industry in the San Diego and Imperial County region. Thirteen of the graduates and other EDGE participants have already landed jobs or are headed to graduate school for further training.
“With this training, these students are prepared to support the region's growing biofuels companies and help San Diego continue to be a leader in the biofuels sector,” said Jason Anderson, vice president of CleanTECH San Diego, a non-profit organization that is helping to accelerate San Diego as a world leader in the clean technology economy.
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Glowing, Blinking Bacteria Reveal How Cells Synchronize Biological Clocks
Biologists have long known that organisms from bacteria to humans use the 24 hour cycle of light and darkness to set their biological clocks. But exactly how these clocks are synchronized at the molecular level to perform the interactions within a population of cells that depend on the precise timing of circadian rhythms is less well understood.
To better understand that process, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego created a model biological system consisting of glowing, blinking E. coli bacteria. This simple circadian system, the researchers report in the September 2 issue of Science, allowed them to study in detail how a population of cells synchronizes their biological clocks and enabled the researchers for the first time to describe this process mathematically.
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Biologists' Discovery May Force Revision of Biology Textbooks
Basic biology textbooks may need a bit of revising now that biologists at UC San Diego have discovered a never-before-noticed component of our basic genetic material.
According to the textbooks, chromatin, the natural state of DNA in the cell, is made up of nucleosomes. And nucleosomes are the basic repeating unit of chromatin.
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Biologists Discover an 'Evening' Protein Complex That Regulates Plant Growth
Farmers and other astute observers of nature have long known that crops like corn and sorghum grow taller at night. But the biochemical mechanisms that control this nightly stem elongation, common to most plants, have been something of a mystery to biologists–until now.
In this week’s early online publication of the journal Nature, biologists at the University of California, San Diego report their discovery of a protein complex they call the “evening complex” that regulates the rhythmic growth of plants during the night. More importantly, the biologists show how this protein complex is intricately coordinated through the biological clock with the genes that promote stem elongation in a way that could enable plant breeders to engineer new varieties of crops that grow faster, produce greater yields of food or generate more biomass per acre of land for conversion into biofuels.
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Courtesy of the National Cancer InstituteBlood Simpler
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a gene and a novel signaling pathway, both critical for making the first hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in developing vertebrate embryos. The discovery has implications for developing stem cell-based therapies for diseases like leukemia and congenital blood disorders.
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Credit: Yang Xu, UC San DiegoStudy Finds Therapies Using Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Could Encounter Immune Rejection Problems
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that an important class of stem cells known as “induced pluripotent stem cells,” or iPSCs, derived from an individual’s own cells, could face immune rejection problems if they are used in future stem cell therapies.
In today’s advance online issue of the journal Nature, the researchers report the first clear evidence of immune system rejection of cells derived from autologous iPSCs that can be differentiated into a wide variety of cell types.
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Credit: Nathan Schoepp, UCSDCalifornia Energy Commission Awards UCSD $2 Million for Biofuels Research
The California Energy Commission has awarded $2 million to UC San Diego to accelerate research that will demonstrate the feasibility of using a variety of new kinds of biofuels to supplement or replace petroleum-based transportation fuels in the future.
The state agency selected the university for the award, which will be used to investigate a wide range of plant-based biofuels, because it is one of the nation’s leaders in developing technologies to turn algae into biofuels. Last year, a consortium of research institutions headed by UCSD received $9-million from the U.S. Department of Energy and another $3 million from biotechnology and energy companies for algal biofuels research. The university is also a partner in a $4-million grant awarded last year by the California Department of Labor to train workers in the San Diego and Imperial County region for jobs in the emerging biofuels industry.
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Nathan Schoepp, UCSDElectrical Oscillations Found to be Critical for Storing Spatial Memories in Brain
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that electrical oscillations in the brain, long thought to play a role in organizing cognitive functions such as memory, are critically important for the brain to store the information that allows us to navigate through our physical environment.
The scientists report in the April 29 issue of the journal Science that neurons called "grid cells" that create maps of the external environment in one portion of our brain require precisely timed electrical oscillations in order to function properly from another part of the brain that serves as a kind of neural pacemaker.
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UCSDFruit Fly's Response to Starvation Could Help Control Human Appetites
Biologists at UC San Diego have identified the molecular mechanisms triggered by starvation in fruit flies that enhance the nervous system’s response to smell, allowing these insects and presumably vertebrates–including humans–to become more efficient and voracious foragers when hungry.
Their discovery of the neural changes that control odor-driven food searches in flies, which they detail in a paper in the April 1 issue of the journal Cell, could provide a new way to potentially regulate human appetite.
By developing drugs to enhance or minimize the activity of nerve-signaling chemicals called neuropeptides released during starvation to enhance the sense of smell, scientists may be able to decrease the propensity among obese individuals to overeat when encountering delectable food odors, if similar molecular mechanisms exist in humans. They could also increase the appetites among the infirm, elderly and others who may have problems eating enough. The method could even be used to improve the growth of farmed animals or to reduce feed waste.
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Three Biology Graduate Students Selected for Bouchet Graduate Honor Society
We are pleased to share that three of our graduate students were selected as members of the Bouchet Graduate Honor Society members for 2011. We congratulate Tenai Eguen, Samuel Lasse, and Christine Shulse on this achievement.
The Bouchet Graduate Honor Society was founded in 2005 by Yale and Howard universities to recognize outstanding scholarly achievement and promote diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate. It is named after Edward A. Bouchet, the first African American to obtain a PhD from an American university. UC San Diego became a member chapter of the society in 2008. The students selected exemplify the characteristics of Bouchet – scholarship, leadership, character, service and advocacy.
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Publication co-authored by UCSD Biological Studies professor Julian Schroeder awarded 2010 Cozzarelli Prize
A paper co-authored by Professor Julian Schroeder on the identification of genes that control toxic metal accumulation in plants that was published last November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has won a 2010 Cozzarelli Prize. His post doctoral associated and PEW Latin America Fellow, David Mendoza Cozatl, played a key role in the research discovery.
Papers selected for the Cozzarelli Prize were chosen from more than 3,700 research articles published by PNAS in 2010 and represent the six broadly defined classes under which the National Academy of Sciences is organized.
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Biology Associate Dean and Assistant Professor named Diversity Champions at 2010 Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards Program
Associate Dean for Education, Gabriele Wienhausen, and Assistant Professor Gentry Patrick have both been chosen by the campus for Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards. This awards program recognizes those individuals, departments and organizational units who have made outstanding contributions in support of UC San Diego's commitment to diversity. A review committee composed of representatives from each vice chancellor area evaluated the nominations and recommended them to the Chancellor for her approval. This award recognizes the hard work and innovation that Gabriele and Gentry, together with faculty and staff partners, have employed to improve the diversity climate of our Division. They received their awards at a special ceremony that took place on Tuesday, Feb 8 in the Price Center Ballroom West.
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UC San Diego Biologists Gain New Insights into Brain Circuit Wiring
Neurobiologists at UC San Diego have discovered new ways by which nerves are guided to grow in highly directed ways to wire the brain during embryonic development.
Their finding, detailed in a paper in the February 15 issue of the journal Developmental Cell, provides a critical piece of understanding to the longstanding puzzle of how the human brain wires itself into the complex networks that underlie our behavior.
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Terrence J. Sejnowski
Biology Professor Terrence Sejnowski Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Biology Professor Terrence Sejnowski has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Sejnowski, who is Francis Crick professor and director of the computational neurobiology laboratory at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a professor of neurobiology at UCSD, was cited by the academy “for contributions to artificial and real neural network algorithms and applying signal processing models to neuroscience.”
Sejnowski was one of 68 new members and nine foreign associates who were elected this year to the NAE, bringing the total U.S. membership of the academy to 2,290 and the number of foreign associates to 202.
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UC San Diego Biology Student Wins Prestigious Churchill Scholarship
An undergraduate biology major at the University of California, San Diego has won a prestigious Churchill Scholarship to study at Cambridge University in the UK next year, one of only 14 students nationwide this year to receive the coveted honor.
Recipients are chosen based on academic accomplishments and demonstrated commitment to a career in science, engineering or mathematics, including substantial accomplishments in original research. Eight of 480 former Churchill Scholars have gone on to win a Nobel Prize.
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Yishi Jin Named as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Biology professor Yishi Jin is one of seven UC San Diego faculty members named 2011 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Jin, who is also an adjunct professor of in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, was cited for her contributions in studying neurodevelopment using the nematode C. elegans.
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Researchers Discover Compound with Potent Effects on Biological Clock
Using an automated screening technique developed by pharmaceutical companies to find new drugs, a team of researchers from UC San Diego and three other research institutions has discovered a molecule with the most potent effects ever seen on the biological clock.
Dubbed by the scientists “longdaysin,” for its ability to dramatically slow down the biological clock, the new compound and the application of their screening method to the discovery of other clock-shifting chemicals could pave the way for a host of new drugs to treat severe sleep disorders or quickly reset the biological clocks of jet-lagged travelers who regularly travel across multiple time zones.
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Biologists Identify Genes That Control Toxic Metal Accumulation in Plants
Biologists at UC San Diego and four other institutions have identified a long-sought after family of genes that controls how yeast and plants accumulate toxic heavy metals and arsenic inside their cells. Their discovery, published in two separate scientific papers, is a significant advance with the potential to restore environmentally damaged waste sites and protect the food supply from toxic metal contamination.
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UC San Diego Biologists Discover Second Motor Protein That Rewinds DNA
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have found another member in a new class of cellular motor proteins that rewind and seal together sections of the double-stranded DNA molecule that occasionally but perilously become unwound. Their discovery, which provides a promising new avenue for the development of drugs that kill cancer cells, is detailed in a paper published in this week’s early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Emily Troemel
Assistant Professor Emily Troemel Awarded with Packard Fellowship for Science & Engineering
Emily Troemel, an assistant professor of biology, has been named a recipient of a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, one of 17 faculty members nationwide to have been selected for the honor this year. Each fellow will receive an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. Troemel was awarded the fellowship to study microsporidia pathogens–intracellular fungal pathogens that cause serious disease in agricultural and medical settings–and to provide molecular insights that will have significant impact on how to control them, as well as many other kinds of pathogenic microbes.
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Nightshades' Mating Habits Strike Uneasy Evolutionary Balance
Most flowering plants are equipped with both male and female sex organs and many can fertilize themselves and procreate without the aid of a mate. But this may only present a short-term adaptive benefit, according to a study published in today’s issue of the journal Science. A team of biologists, which includes a biology professor at UC San Diego, report that long-term evolutionary survival of a species favors flowers that only use pollen from another plant.
"We found those species that avoid self-fertilization diversify faster, giving them a long-term advantage," former UCSD graduate student Emma Goldberg said.
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Biologists Use Fruit Flies to Reveal Secrets of How Anthrax Kills
Two groups of researchers at UC San Diego have found an explanation for a longstanding mystery of how two very different toxins from anthrax bacteria work together to disrupt essential cell functions during infection with this potential bioterrorism threat.
One group, looking at the effect of anthrax toxins in fruit flies, and the other, examining anthrax in mice and human cells, demonstrate that the two anthrax toxins act in a cooperative fashion to prevent the final step by which cells transport molecules to their surfaces in order to communicate and adhere to one another.
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Barred Eagle OwlCredit: Brandon Lim, via Wikimedia CommonsBiologists Develop Model to Predict Extinction Risk to Birds
Biologists at Yale and UC San Diego have developed a tool to improve biodiversity conservation during rapid global change: a statistical model that helps predict the risk of extinction for almost 90 percent of the world’s bird species.
“Our global study confirms and extends existing knowledge about what makes some species more threatened than others,” said Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and co-author of the study. A former biology professor at UCSD, Jetz and Tien Ming Lee, a UCSD biology graduate student and the first author of the study, published their paper online this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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UC San Diego’s Biological Sciences Programs Ranked Number One in the Nation
UC San Diego’s Biological Sciences programs are ranked number one in the nation, according to the National Research Council’s comprehensive assessment of the quality of more than 5,000 doctoral programs in 62 fields at 212 U.S. research institutions.
The NRC Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs, released today, is the most highly regarded “gold standard” rating of doctoral programs and faculty scholarship. Its determinations provide a more comprehensive assessment of doctoral programs and, thus, provide more weight within academe than many current popular rankings done by magazines and other publications.
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Biologists Discover Biochemical Link Between Biological Clock and Diabetes
Biologists have found that a key protein that regulates the biological clocks of mammals also regulates glucose production in the liver and that altering the levels of this protein can improve the health of diabetic mice.
Their discovery, detailed in this week’s advance online publication of the journal Nature Medicine, provides an entirely new biochemical approach for scientists to develop treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes. It also raises the interesting possibility that some of the rise in diabetes in the U.S. and other major industrialized countries could be a consequence of disturbances in sleep-wake cycles from our increasingly around-the-clock lifestyles.
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Discovery of Novel Filaments by UCSD Biologists Suggests a New Track for Cancer Treatment
How do cells divide, muscles contract, and neurons make connections? The answer to each of these questions is the cytoskeleton — a set of proteins that can form filaments or tracks within the cell. The known filament forming proteins have roles in cancer and neurodegeneration, but it has been unclear whether these are the only tracks in the cell. Now a team of biologists at UC San Diego has discovered a novel set of intracellular tracks.
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Students travel to Mexico for Advanced Ecology Course
One of the most biodiverse regions of North America is the site for the Advanced Field Ecology course offered by Dr. Therese Markow. In southern Sonora, the state just below Arizona, the Sonoran Desert meets the Tropical Decidous Forest, affording students to study in two magnificent habitats in one week. Students will be lodged in the colonial town of Alamos, a former capitol of the entire Sinaloa-Sonora-Arizona-California region and the site of some of Mexico’s largest silver mines.
Students will be examining tree and cactus biodiversity, studying hummingbird behavior, and investigating the insects associated with various types of fruits and plants. Participating students will be conducting original research projects on local flora and fauna during their stay.
They will be treated to guest lectures by Drs. Patricia Gowaty and Stephen Hubbell of UCLA and the Smithsonian Tropical Researh Institite, Dr. Edward Pfeiler of Mexico’s Centro de Investigaciones en Alimenacion y Desarollo (CIAD), and Dr. Maxi Polihrohanakis of UCSD.
