September 19, 2023
The time and money required to engineer microbes to produce vital medicines and chemicals can be dramatically reduced with a new model-based method Using engineered microbes as microscopic factories has given the world steady sources of life-saving drugs, revolutionized the food industry, and allowed us to make sustainable versions of valuable chemicals previously made from petroleum.…
September 15, 2023
UC Berkeley CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna is one of 60 Nobel Prize winners captured by renowned German photographer Herlinde Koelbl in striking black and white portraits that spotlight on the palms of the scientists’ hands their discoveries and insights. Forty of these unique portraits will be on display in the second-floor atrium of Berkeleys Li…
September 08, 2023
The American Chemical Society (ACS) has announced Chris Chang and Michelle Chang as recipients of ACS National Awards for 2024. Michelle Chang has been given the ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry, sponsored by the ACS Division of Fluorine Chemistry. Chris Chang has been recognized with the Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry, supported by an…
July 06, 2023
Berkeley-led study highlights key role of community environmental factors in transmission of resistance genes Increasing access to clean water and flush toilets could be an effective way to curb the rise of antibiotic resistance, particularly in urban areas of Africa and Southeast Asia. That’s among the key findings from a new ecological study, published today in Lancet…
June 20, 2023
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience has announced the selection of ten neuroscientists to receive the 2023 McKnight Scholar Award. Karthik Shekhar, Asst. Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley, has been awarded a scholarship for his project entitled Evolution of neural diversity and patterning in the visual system. Prof. Shekhar is also a member of…
June 14, 2023
Using a complex cast of metal-studded pigments, proteins, enzymes, and co-enzymes, photosynthetic organisms can convert the energy in light into the chemical energy for life. And now, thanks to a study published today in Nature, we know that this organic chemical reaction is sensitive to the smallest quantity of light possible – a single photon. The discovery…
June 13, 2023
Synthetic biologists have become increasingly creative in engineering yeast or bacteria to churn out useful chemicals — from fuels to fabrics and drugs — beyond the normal repertoire of microbes. But a multi-university group of chemists has a more ambitious goal: to retool the cell’s polypeptide manufacturing plants — the ribosomes that spin amino acids…
May 31, 2023
Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Biosciences Area, has won the 2023 Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine for pioneering structural biology that enabled visualization, at the level of individual atoms, of the protein machines responsible for gene transcription, one of life’s fundamental processes. Nogales, who is also a…