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.
Department News
Below are articles from various sources about members of MCB and their research.
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.
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.
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.
September 22, 2009
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.
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.
June 18, 2009
Andreas Martin has been named as one of the 2009 Searle Scholars. The Searle Scholars Program makes grants to selected universities and research centers to support the independent research of exceptional young faculty in the biomedical sciences and chemistry.
Two MCB Ph.D Alumni (Iain Cheeseman and Danica Chen) are also among the 2009 awardees.