News
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Undergrad’s “crazy idea” leads to a promising biotech device
By Tim Stephens, UCSC Public Information Office In Nader Pourmand’s bioinstrumentation class, students are encouraged to come up with their own ideas for new biotechnology devices and applications. Sometimes, their “crazy ideas” turn into important research projects. That was the case for Queralt Vallmajo Martin, an exchange student from Spain who took Pourmand’s course during…
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NSF program supports minority graduate students
By Tim Stephens, UCSC Public Information Office The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded nearly $1 million to establish a Bridge to the Doctorate program at UC Santa Cruz that will provide fellowships for science and engineering graduate students from underrepresented minority populations. The new program–the first of its kind on the UCSC campus–will increase…
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Diving to extremes
By Gwyneth Dickey, UCSC Science Communication Program The researchers rushed across the ice to their cabin, popped in the flash card, and sat down to watch. They had just retrieved the winter’s first equipment package and couldn’t wait to see the new footage. They leaned forward and suddenly plunged into the sea off Antarctica, diving…
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A zoo without bars
By Marissa Cevallos, UCSC Science Communication Program From San Diego to Sao Paulo, from Copenhagen to Canberra, biologists are shepherding animals two by two. From one male and one female, the scientists will scrape tissue samples the size of a penny to freeze in liquid nitrogen at -112°F. More than a million copies of DNA…
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STING in the world of biosensor technology
By Nathan Boyd How could you go about finding one particular bee in a hive bustling with activity? Extending this analogy to early cancer and pathogen detection gives the sense of what is required when cell biologists search for one type of biomolecule in a crowded and constantly-changing environment. In his laboratory at the University…
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Neanderthal genome yields insights into human evolution and evidence of interbreeding
By Tim Stephens, UCSC Public Information Office After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, yielding important new insights into the evolution of modern humans. Among the findings, published in the May 7 issue of Science, is evidence that shortly after early modern humans…
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Nadine Gassner receives 2010 Ellen Weaver Award for mentoring women in science
By Tim Stephens, UCSC Public Information OfficeNadine Gassner, associate director of the UC Santa Cruz Chemical Screening Center, has been chosen to receive the 2010 Ellen Weaver Award for mentoring young women in science.The Ellen Weaver Award, presented by the Northern California Chapter of the Association of Women in Science (NCC-AWIS), is given to a woman who is…
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Nader Pourmand and Ion Torrent
By Richard Hughey, Computer Engineering Dept, UCSC Biomolecular engineering’s Nader Pourmand is profiled in a Bio-IT world article discussing the third-generation sequencing company ION Torrent Systems. Inventions of Pourmand, Stanford professor Ron Davis, and colleagues have led to a method of sequencing genomes with a CMOS chip, a technology that, as with computers, could lead to extraordinarily inexpensive…
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New UCSC training program fosters ethics and justice discourse in science and engineering
By Branwyn Wagman This spring the University of California, Santa Cruz will launch a unique graduate-level training program funded by a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to cross-train scientists and engineers in humanities and social sciences, and vice versa. Science and engineering students will work alongside social science and humanities students to identify…
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Scientists propose a “genome zoo” of 10,000 vertebrate species
By Branwyn Wagman, Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering, UC Santa Cruz SANTA CRUZ, CA–In the most comprehensive study of animal evolution ever attempted, an international consortium of scientists plans to assemble a genomic zoo–a collection of DNA sequences for 10,000 vertebrate species, approximately one for every vertebrate genus. Known as the Genome 10K Project, it…
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Nanopore project wins $1.1 million NIH grant
By Tim Stephens, Public Information Office The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has awarded a $1.1 million grant to researchers in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz to support their work on nanopore technology for analyzing DNA. Led by biomolecular engineers Mark Akeson and David Deamer, the UCSC nanopore group…
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Databases and Genome Browsers
The advent of the human genome project and subsequent projects to sequence genomes of other species and multiple individuals has driven the need for tools that can visualize vast amounts of genomics data. Software for genome browsing has had a vast impact in the arenas of human medical and genetics research, enabling researchers to process…