Bags of plastic bottles

How to make plastic truly biodegradable

UC Berkeley’s Ting Xu and her students have come up with one solution for the global problem of single-use plastics: embed enzymes in the plastic, so that once the bag or cup is no longer wanted, it will self-destruct with a little heat and water.

Using two CRISPR enzymes, a COVID diagnostic in only 20 minutes

In efforts to develop a COVID-19 diagnostic test faster than qRT-PCR, a research team led by QB3-Berkeley affiliates Jennifer Doudna, David Savage, and Patrick Hsu have combined two different types of CRISPR enzymes to create an assay that can detect small amounts of viral RNA in less than an hour.

Berkeley startup aims to be a game changer in autoimmune disease therapy

In January 2020, Marco Lobba had developed a new way of fusing proteins together that he thought could help treat autoimmune diseases like lupus, multiple sclerosis or Type 1 diabetes. A year later, he and Geo Guillen remotely launched Catena Biosciences, turning the potentially lifesaving idea into a successful company.