Department News

Show your Blue and Gold spirit by participating in this year's Big Give. This is a chance for us all to come together as an entire Cal commuity—alumni, parents, students, faculty, staff, and friends—to support our favorite department. Even the smallest gift can make a big difference!

This year, we're funding two main initiatives:

1. Expand tutoring services: As the MCB major continues to grow, we want to expand our tutoring opportunities to students in upper division MCB courses such as MCB 102, 104, and 110.
2. Establish a teaching award for outstanding Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs): MCB GSIs are integral to the success of our undergraduates. This award will recognize their invaluable contribution to teaching excellence.

Consider making a donation to the MCB Department to help us create many more great moments in the future!

New research from the lab of MCB Professor Richard Kramer shows that a new therapy "could help prolong useful vision and delay total blindness" in humans with deteriorating vision. The treatment, which has been successful in trials with mice, utilizes drug or gene therapy to reduce interfering noise generated by nerve cells in the eye. Reduction of this noise can improve vision for those suffering from vision loss, including common age-related macular degeneration.

“This isn’t a cure for these diseases, but a treatment that may help people see better. This won’t put back the photoreceptors that have died, but maybe give people an extra few years of useful vision with the ones that are left,” says Kramer.

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MCB Professor Michael Eisen has been named the new Editor-in-Chief of eLife, a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal for biomedical and life sciences. Eisen has long been a vocal proponent of open-access scientific publishing and reforming research communication.

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Congratulations to Associate Professor of MCB, NST & Chemistry Daniel Nomura for winning an ASPIRE Award from the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research! This award "funds high risk, high reward approaches to solving complex problems in cancer research that tend to fall outside the scope of other funding opportunities."

Nomura's lab is mapping hotspots of binding sites in human proteins that have been traditionally considered "undruggable" and developing novel small molecule drugs that bind to those proteins.

Congratulations to MCB Assistant Professor Priya Moorjani, who has been named a 2019 Sloan Research Fellow! The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards this fellowship to outstanding early-career researchers and funds $70,000 over two years to fund their research.

Moorjani's lab studies evolutionary history and its impact on human adaptation and disease.

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New research published in Nature from Assistant Adjunct Professor Professor Karen Davies and Associate Professor David Savage reveals the structure of NDH, a protein structure necessary for photosynthesis. This new molecular blueprint will allow researchers to directly test hypotheses of how NDH facilitates sugar production.

“This work will lead to a better understanding of how photosynthesis occurs, which could allow us to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants and other green organisms – potentially boosting the amount of food, and thus biomass, they produce,” said lead researcher Davies.

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A new paper published in Nature from the lab of MCB Associate Professor Ahmet Yildiz shows how the structure of dynein, a family of cytoskeletal motor proteins, determines its directionality. By engineering variants of dynein with altered stalk angles, the researchers uncover why all dyneins move toward only the minus end of a microtubule during cytoskeletal movement.

The research is a collaboration with scientists from the Medical Research Council in the UK and Istanbul Technical University.

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Congratulations to Professors Daniel Fletcher and Iswar Hariharan, two new Miller Professors from MCB! The Miller Professorship award allows UC Berkeley faculty the opportunity to join the interdisciplinary community surrounding the Miller Institute and pursue new research directions.

A new paper published in Nature from the labs of MCB Professors Jennifer Doudna and Eva Nogales reveals the power and potential of the CRISPR-CasX gene editing enzyme. Compared to its well-studied cousins Cas9 and Cas12, CasX is much smaller and may be better shaped for more efficient genetic engineering.

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Congratulations to MCB & Chemistry Professor Chris Chang, winner of the 2019 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Chemistry from Tel Aviv University. This prize is awarded to outstanding young scientists under 45 years of age who exhibit great originality and excellence in their research.

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