Biological Sciences

Reconstructing the chromosomes of the earliest animals on Earth

February 4, 2022

Many of today’s marine invertebrates, including sponges and jellyfish, have chromosomes with the same ancient structure they inherited from their primitive ancestors more than 600 million years ago, according to a new study.

The surprise finding is a reminder that evolution is conservative — it keeps things that work well, like the organization of genes on a chromosome — and provides a key link between creatures alive today, including humans, and our very distant ancestors.

“It emphasizes that even in something as fundamental as their chromosomes, diverse animals resemble...

Mapping the Brain: Functional brain mapping for understanding health, aging, and disease

January 12, 2022

All of human experience - our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, plans and actions - reflect the coordinated activity of a complex network of hundreds of distinct areas and modules within the brain. Disorders of these brain networks that occur during development, aging, or due to neurological disease, can have profound effects on quality of life. Therefore, understanding how information is represented and processed in this network during daily life is a major challenge for medicine. Addressing this fundamental problem will require advances in the software algorithms used to process...

Meet Carson McNealy '23 (Nutritional Science and Psychology)

December 20, 2021
L&S Student Spotlight: Carson McNealy ‘23

Carson McNealy, student ambassadorMajors: Nutritional Science (Rausser College of Natural Resources) and Psychology (College of Letters & Science)

When Carson McNealy randomly chose a Cal sweatshirt her freshman year of high school as a new addition to her wardrobe, she had no idea of the journey she would eventually be embarking on as a...

UC Berkeley commencement for class of 2021 speaks on preservation

December 20, 2021

The graduating class of 2021 shared a single emotion: preservation. Being able to survive the most recent years strengthened the class and created a sense of connection and family between its members.

During Saturday’s commencement, the host, campus Associate Dean of Students Alfred Day, recognized the original settlers of the Berkeley area, the Huchiun. He acknowledged everyone benefits from the land in the Berkeley area and that it is the responsibility of the UC Berkeley community to acknowledge these original residents and their current prosperity.

“Consistent with our...

When ecology meets art, you get a dating site for trees

November 19, 2021

In 2015, as a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, Juniper Harrower was planning to go back to Costa Rica, where she’d been working in the cloud forests to study patterns of forest regeneration. But then she learned something — something heart-wrenching — that would change the path of her research.

“Scientists had just found out that Joshua trees were really impacted by climate change and could be gone from the National Park within 100 years,” said Harrower. “When I read that, it was such a gut punch.”

What it takes to eat a poisonous butterfly

November 22, 2021

Monarch butterflies and their close relatives thrive on poisonous milkweed, thanks to genetic mutations that block the effects of the plant’s toxins while allowing the poisons to accumulate in the caterpillar or adult insects as deterrents to hungry predators.

Turns out some of those insect-eating predators evolved similar mutations in order to feast on monarchs.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Current Biology, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC Riverside report monarch-like genetic mutations in the genomes of four organisms...

Meet Carissa Samuel, Health + Tech ’23 (Molecular and Cellular Biology)

November 19, 2021
Carissa Samuel '23, a Health + Tech fellow studying MCB and Dance & PerformanceCarissa Samuel is a Health + Tech fellow studying Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) with a minor in Dance and Performance studies. Here, she shares more about her personal and professional interests and why she chose the Fung Fellowship.

I am a current junior studying Molecular and Cellular Biology, with...

Genes Reveal How Some Rockfish Live up to 200 Years

November 11, 2021

Few groups of animals encapsulate the extremes of longevity more than fish. While coral reef pygmy govies survive for less than ten weeks, Greenland sharks can endure more than 500 years. So when a team of biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to explore the genetics of aging, they grabbed their fishing gear.

UC Berkeley again No.1 public, fourth best globally in U.S. News rankings

October 26, 2021

For the eighth straight year, UC Berkeley tops the list of the world’s best public universities and remains the fourth-best university overall in U.S. News & World Report’s 2022 global universities rankings.