Department News

Keeping Bio 1A labs running smoothly

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.

UC Berkeley research garners nearly $65 million in federal stimulus money

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).

"These extra research funds are a big plus for the campus, enhancing its research agenda and allowing us to hire additional students, post-doctoral fellows and technicians," said
Mark Schlissel, professor of molecular and cell biology and dean of the biological sciences in UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Science.

Chromosomes dance and pair up on the nuclear membrane

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.

Two Nobel Prize recipients have UC Berkeley ties

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.

The Immortality Enzyme

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.

Former Grad Student Lead Author of Lewin's GENES X

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.

MCB Faculty Member Named as MacArthur Genius Fellow

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.

Photoswitches shed light on burst swimming in zebrafish

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.

Read the press release >

Former Grad Student Chief of Staff at NIH

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.

Improving vaccines to trigger T cell as well as antibody response

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‰Ûªt 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.

The findings support a new hypothesis about how the innate immune system distinguishes pathogenic from non-pathogenic microbes, proposed by Professor Daniel Portnoy, UC Berkeley colleague Russell Vance, assistant professor of molecular and cell biology, and Ralph Isberg of Tufts University in the July 23 issue of the journal Cell Host & Microbe.