May 09, 2023
A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals. The advance – which was recently announced in the journal Nature – uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature reaction called the “carbene…
May 04, 2023
Richard (Ed) Green, professor of biomolecular engineering, has been selected to serve as the next director of the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) at UC Santa Cruz. QB3 is the University of California’s hub for innovation and entrepreneurship in life science, working with UC researchers and other scientists to launch startup companies and partner…
May 04, 2023
Seven UC Berkeley faculty members were among 120 new members and 23 new international members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced this week, an honor that recognizes their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The seven new members are neuroscientist Marla Feller, herpetologist Tyrone Hayes, economists Hilary Hoynes and Emmanuel Saez, chemists Jeffrey Long and T. Don Tilley and biochemist Donald Rio. There…
April 18, 2023
Bilge Ozaydin is the Director of the Strain Discovery and Development group at Pivot Bio. The QB3-Berkeley Professionals in Residence program will be joined by Ozaydin on Friday, May 5th. UC Berkeley and LBL trainees may register for Ozaydin’s events here. Ozaydin spoke with postdoctoral researcher Briana Van Treeck about her scientific journey. Briana Van…
April 17, 2023
$70M funding will catalyze a bold new initiative led by Jennifer Doudna and Jill Banfield to apply precision genome editing to microbial communities. The Audacious Project, an initiative housed at TED, encourages the world’s greatest changemakers to dream bigger. A new initiative led by Jennifer Doudna and Jill Banfield at the Innovative Genomics Institute and announced today at…
April 06, 2023
Professor Dan Fletcher has received the 2023 the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, a campus-wide award that recognizes faculty for outstanding mentorship of UC Berkeley graduate students. Fletcher was nominated by his current and former graduate students and has long been a sought-after mentor of students and faculty of all levels.
March 30, 2023
James Hurley is a professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. The Hurley lab is interested in fundamental questions of how the interactions between proteins and membranes determine cell and organelle shape and the evolution of shape over time; how protein-membrane interactions turn on and off the…
March 20, 2023
Most life on Earth is based on polymers of 20 amino acids that have evolved into hundreds of thousands of different, highly specialized proteins. They catalyze reactions, form backbone and muscle and even generate movement. But is all that variety necessary? Could biology work just as well with fewer building blocks and simpler polymers? Ting…