Category: News
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Splice of life: Merging RNA biology and medicine
Sarah C. P. Williams | UCSC Magazine | May 2023 One day in 2018, UCSC Associate Professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology Olena Vaske received a large electronic file from doctors at Stanford Medicine. The file contained data on a toddler with a rare cancer in his liver and lungs. Other researchers had already sequenced the…
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40 years cancer free: Why Mike Dolder is shaving his head
May 24, 2023 Mike Dolder is the Director of Engineering for UC Santa Cruz’s Physical Planning, Development & Operations department (PPDO), which manages and oversees all physical planning, design, and construction activities on campus. When Mike was only two years old, he was diagnosed with Stage IV Wilms tumor, a form of kidney cancer. Clinical…
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Human pangenome reference will enable more complete and equitable understanding of genomic diversity
Emily Cerf | UCSC | May 10, 2023 Read on the UCSC News Center. UC Santa Cruz scientists, along with a consortium of researchers, have released a draft of the first human pangenome—a new, usable reference for genomics that combines the genetic material of 47 individuals from different ancestral backgrounds to allow for a deeper,…
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Comb jellies proven to be the sibling group to all other animals
Comb jellies proven to be the sibling group to all other animals Emily Cerf and Raúl Nava | UCSC | May 17, 2023 All animals are related to each other, but comb jellies — a marine invertebrate found in oceans around the world — are the most distantly related to all other animals, shows a new…
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Ed Green named QB3-Santa Cruz Scientific Director
Emily Cerf | UCSC | May 3, 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…
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Special Zoonomia issue of Science offers fresh insights on human, and canine, evolution
This article is about a series of 11 papers published in a special issue of Science. The research was made possible in part by the Cactus alignment tool created at UC Santa Cruz and contains exciting discoveries by a number of our scientists. For additional coverage of the Zoonomia papers, please see “DNA analysis can…
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Biologist Beth Shapiro elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Tim Stephens | UCSC | April 19, 2023 Beth Shapiro, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Shapiro was among nearly 270 new members of the academy announced this week, including…
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Genomics Institute postdoc mentors budding entrepreneurs through Clinton Global Initiative University
Schneider has been a mentor for the Clinton Global Initiative University in the area of infectious diseases since 2018, helping students take their ideas for making a positive impact on the world from conception to reality. Each year, he receives a cohort that ranges in size from 15 to 30 students, who come to him…
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Naming system for transfer RNA fragments will increase research productivity, standardization
Emily Cerf | UCSC | April 12, 2023 Transfer RNA, more commonly referred to as tRNA, is well known for its key role in translating genetic material into protein. Recent discoveries about fragments of tRNA, which scientists had previously thought of as simply waste products in the cell ecosystem, has led to an increase in…
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Adjunct Professor Robert Coffman helps immunize millions
Robert Coffman, an adjunct professor of biomolecular engineering at UC Santa Cruz, is an expert in the human innate immune response and a pioneer of adjuvant technology to make traditional vaccines more effective. During the pandemic, he was called on to adapt this technology for Covid-19 vaccines.
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Two major stem cell research projects supported with more than $2.6 million in funding
The UCSC Genomics Institute’s Max Haeussler and his team will use the CIRM funding to build a user-friendly database imagined as a “virtual microscope” which will improve the curation and visualization of this data and allow scientists to investigate the role of a specific gene in the development of the cerebral cortex without special computational…
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Indigenous peoples and local communities as partners in the sequencing of global eukaryotic biodiversity
Several large current initiatives seek to catalog the genomes of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity. How do we ethically access and use samples from all species, including those under the custodianship of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities? UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute researcher Ann McCartney and her colleagues provide a framework