Image of the Arc Institute building at sunset

UC Berkeley partners with new Arc Institute to tackle complex diseases

UC Berkeley is partnering with UC San Francisco and Stanford University as founding scientific members of a new institute that aims to accelerate breakthroughs in complex diseases. The Arc Institute was officially launched today (Dec. 15) with the goal of developing a new model for collaborative research that brings together world-class research with unconstrained funding…

Lost in translation

Graduate student Leah Gulyas explores how one tiny coronavirus protein blockades host cells—and how a few simple changes can flip the script. Mission control! Mission control! Do you read me? While these lines might first bring to mind a movie scene of astronauts frantically trying to contact their home base following a disastrous event in…

CRISPRing the microbiome is just around the corner

The UC Berkeley group that invented the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology nearly 10 years ago has found a way to add or modify genes within a community of many different species simultaneously, opening the door to what could be called “community editing.”

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.