Assistant Professor of Immunology and Pathogenesis Greg Barton is the 2010 recipient of the American Association of Immunologist (AAI) BD Biosciences Investigator Award. This award is presented to an early-career investigator who has made outstanding contributions to the field of immunology.
Department News
Below are articles from various sources about members of MCB and their research.
MCB Professor of Neurobiology, Mu-ming Poo has recently published a paper in Science addressing a fundamental question of neurodevelopment about how neurons become polarized -- i.e. how growing neurites in a young neuron decide whether to become an axon or a dendrite. His group showed that reciprocal interactions between intracellular signaling cascades underlie this event.
Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology David Bilder will receive the 2010 Harland Winfield Mossman Award in Developmental Biology and present an award lecture on Function Follows Form: Linking Epithelial Polarity, Growth Control, and Morphogenesis in Drosophila during the Young Investigator Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Anatomists (AAA)/Experimental Biology (EB) 2010.
The Cell & Developmental Biology Division is hosting a one-day Symposium on Non-coding RNA on March 23, 2010. Information about the schedule, speakers and free registration are available by following the link below.
In a report in this week's early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, researchers show that the H1N1, or swine flu, virus adopted a new mutation in one of its genes distinct from the mutations found in previous flu viruses, including those responsible for the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, the "Asian" flu pandemic in 1957 and the "Hong Kong" pandemic of 1968.
Read more...The latest issue of the graduate student-run Berkeley Science Review features the research of several MCB faculty members, including Yang Dan, Diana Bautista, and
Erol Kepkep began working at the campus‰Ûªs Department of Instruction in Biology in 1987, when he was an undergraduate completing a double major in molecular biology and genetics. In 1989, he moved into the Molecular and Cell Biology Department, where he and his staff are responsible for two Biology 1A lab classrooms. Among the challenges of the job: tracking the lab‰Ûªs snakes and crocodiles when they go missing, juggling enrollment for 600-plus students each semester, and helping protozoans and cyanobacteria flourish.
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).
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.
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.