Department News

Below are articles from various sources about members of MCB and their research.

November 20, 2009

President Barack Obama's stimulus package is already stimulating innovation and jobs at the University of California, Berkeley, with more than 130 projects underway. The work is being funded by nearly $65 million in new money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

November 16, 2009

New findings by University of California, Berkeley, scientists including Molecular & Cell Biology Associate Professor Abby Dernburg show that the cell's cytoskeleton, which moves things around in the cell, plays a critical role, essentially reaching into the nucleus to bring chromosome pairs together in preparation for recombination and segregation.

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October 07, 2009

The bulk of the work for which Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and John Szostak won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine took place at the University of California, Berkeley, when Blackburn was a professor of molecular and cell biology and Greider was her graduate student.

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September 28, 2009

Kathleen Collins, a professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, has made it her business to understand everything she can about this so-called immortality enzyme. Her discoveries about its regulation, assembly and connections to human disease are leading the way toward methods to regulate its production and perhaps treat disorders such as cancer.

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September 28, 2009

Jocelyn E. Krebs who received her PhD from the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology is now the lead author on the newest edition (10th) of a classic molecular biology textbook, now called Lewin's GENES X.

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September 22, 2009

Assistant Professor Lin He (Cell & Developmental Biology) has been named as a prestigious MacArthur "genius" fellow for 2009. MacArthur fellows are selected for their "creativity, originality, and potential" and are awarded $500,000 over 5 years with unrestricted usage.

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September 17, 2009

A new way to select and switch on one cell type in an organism using light has helped answer a long-standing question about the function of one class of enigmatic nerve cells in the spinal cord.

Claire Wyart, post-doctoral fellow in the Isacoff lab at UC Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and UCSF post-doctoral fellow Filippo Del Bene are the joint first authors of a paper describing these results that appears in the Sept. 17 issue of the journal Nature.

September 14, 2009

Kathy Lynn Hudson, who received her PhD from the Molecular Biology department at UC Berkeley in 1989 and is the founding director of Johns Hopkins University's Genetics & Public Policy Center, has been recruited as the chief of staff of the new National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

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September 09, 2009

A new study by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley-based Aduro BioTech provides clues why killed and severely attenuated vaccines don't always work. It also suggests ways to engineer an attenuated vaccine to make it as potent as a live vaccine but as safe as a killed vaccine.

July 06, 2009

It is with regret that we announce that Emeritus Professor Richard Strohman passed away on Saturday, July 4. Dr. Strohman was a member of the Zoology Department (one of the predecessors of MCB), and worked for many years on muscle development.

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