Biological Sciences

L&S staff honored with 2024 Excellence in Management awards

April 23, 2024

The Berkeley Staff Assembly recently announced the recipients of the 36th annual Excellence in Management Award, who are recognized for leading their teams and team members to meaningful accomplishments this past year. This year’s award theme, “Cultivating Staff, Harvesting Success: Recognizing Excellence in Management" highlights leaders who excel in cultivating their staff, leading to overall success for the team and the organization.

The award recipients will be honored at a ceremony on April 30 from 2-3 pm, where Chancellor...

Six UC Berkeley scientists elected lifetime fellows of AAAS

April 19, 2024
Robert Sanders

Six UC Berkeley researchers have been elected 2023 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

The honorees, announced today (Thursday, April 18), are among 502 scientists, engineers and innovators recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

The new UC Berkeley members of the 2023 class of fellows...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/04/18/six-uc-berkeley-scientists-elected-lifetime…

UC Berkeley Launches New Molecular Therapeutics Initiative to Accelerate Drug Discovery

March 14, 2024
Katie Engleman, 1AB

BERKELEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The University of California, Berkeley Molecular Therapeutics (MTx) division of the Molecular & Cell Biology department today announced the launch of a new initiative to accelerate drug discovery at the interface of academia and biotech. The UC Berkeley Molecular Therapeutics Initiative (MTI) will create a foundational bridge between fundamental research in rare neurological and metabolic diseases and drug discovery to identify and accelerate novel therapeutic...

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240314120190/en/UC-Berkeley-Launches-Ne…

Junk DNA in birds may hold key to safe, efficient gene therapy

February 20, 2024
Robert Sanders

The recent approval of a CRISPR-Cas9 therapy for sickle cell disease demonstrates that gene editing tools can do a superb job knocking out genes to cure hereditary disease. But it's still not possible to insert whole genes into the human genome to substitute for defective or deleterious genes.

A new technique that employs a retrotransposon from birds to insert genes into the genome holds more promise for gene therapy, since it inserts genes into a "safe harbor" in the human genome where the insertion won't disrupt essential genes or lead to cancer.

Retrotransposons, or...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/02/20/junk-dna-in-birds-may-hold-key-to-safe-effi…

Nine young faculty members receive prized Sloan Research Fellowships

February 20, 2024
Robert Sanders

Headshots of 2024 Sloan Fellows (nine)

As a sign of the University of California, Berkeley's ability to attract the most promising early-career researchers, nine young assistant professors have been named 2024 Sloan Research Fellows, the largest number from any institution.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/02/20/nine-young-faculty-members-receive-prized-s…

Samantha Lewis honored at Chancellor Christ’s Prytanean Faculty Enrichment Award celebration

February 17, 2024
Cynthia Golembeski, Leigh Genser, and Sana Shaikh

On January 22, 2024, Chancellor Carol Christ hosted a reception at University House honoring 2023 Prytanean Faculty Enrichment Award recipient Samantha Lewis, Assistant Professor of Cell Biology, Development and Physiology. Lewis received the Prytanean Faculty Enrichment Award and $35,000 grant in recognition of outstanding scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and service to UC Berkeley. Her research focusing on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and related scientific insights are critical contributions to individual and population health, given the significant role of mitochondrial disease in the...

https://qb3.berkeley.edu/news/lewis-prytanean-award-celebration-2024/

Are stressed-out brain cells the root cause of neurodegenerative disease?

February 14, 2024
Robert Sanders

Illustration of a brain cell with blue squiggles around a purple circleMany neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, are characterized by the accumulation of protein clumps, or aggregates, in the brain, which has led scientists to assume that the protein tangles kill brain cells. The search for treatments that break up and remove these tangled proteins has had little success, however....

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/02/13/are-stressed-out-brain-cells-the-root-cause…

Highly targeted CRISPR delivery advances gene editing in living animals

February 1, 2024
Robert Sanders

Most approved gene therapies today, including those involving CRISPR-Cas9, work their magic on cells removed from the body, after which the edited cells are returned to the patient.

This technique is ideal for targeting blood cells and is currently the method employed in newly approved CRISPR gene therapies for blood diseases like sickle cell anemia, in which edited blood cells are reinfused in patients after their bone marrow has been destroyed by chemotherapy.

A new, precision-targeted delivery method for CRISPR-Cas9,...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/02/01/highly-targeted-crispr-delivery-advances-ge…

Sparrows uniquely adapted to Bay Area marshes are losing their uniqueness

January 24, 2024
Robert Sanders

The temperate climate of the San Francisco Bay Area has always attracted immigrants — animals and humans — that have had unpredictable impacts on those already living in the area.

For the bay's Savannah sparrow, a subspecies that lives in salty tidal marshes, increased immigration of its inland cousins over the past century has definitely been bad news.

A new genomic analysis of Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) from around the state — many of them collected as far back as 1889, their pelts stored in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/01/24/sparrows-uniquely-adapted-to-bay-area-marsh…

Neanderthals and humans lived side by side in Northern Europe 45,000 years ago

January 31, 2024
Robert Sanders

The evidence that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis lived side by side is consistent with genomic evidence that the two species occasionally interbred. It also feeds the suspicion that the invasion of Europe and Asia by modern humans some 50,000 years ago helped drive Neanderthals, which had occupied the area for more than 500,000 years, to extinction.

The genetic analysis, along with an archaeological and isotopic analysis and radiocarbon dating of the Ranis site, are detailed in a trio of papers appearing today in the journals Nature and Nature Ecology and Evolution.

...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/01/31/neanderthals-and-humans-lived-side-by-side-…