Biological Sciences

“Okay, this is it,” Filipa Rijo-Ferreira thought after hearing some neuroscience presentations. She’d spent a year as a technician in a lab studying sleeping sickness but had never understood why no one studied the way in which the sickness affected the brain. But for this particular disease, it seemed important to study neuroscience and parasitology together. “I’m just going to make my own project.”

Through a unique Ph.D. program in her native Portugal, she was able to combine both fields of research, working with co-advisors on two continents to study the circadian rhythms of...

Think of a large-enrollment class and you might picture a cavernous lecture hall, full of students silently taking notes as the distant instructor imparts wisdom from the front of the room. Learners are expected to absorb knowledge passively; problem-solving and critical thinking are reserved for independent study, or for a few high-stakes exams. It’s not the most thrilling learning environment, nor – as extensive research has shown – is it a particularly effective way for students to learn.

But a team of MCB faculty and grad students envisions a different way of teaching, where...

Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer.

In a study of the relative effects of genetics, aging and the environment on how some 20,000 human genes are expressed, the researchers found that aging and environment are far more important than genetic variation in affecting the expression profiles of many of our genes as we get older. The level at which genes are...

As its name implies, the Devil’s Hole pupfish lives in a truly hellish environment.

Confined to a single deep limestone cave in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, 263 of them live in water that hovers around 93 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with food resources so scarce that they are always on the edge of starvation, and with oxygen levels so low that most other fish would die immediately. The pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, live in the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate.

New research now documents the extreme effect that these harsh and isolated conditions have had on...