January 4, 2016
January 4, 2016 —
David Woodruff, a world-renown conservation geneticist and biogeographer who championed UC San Diego’s role in conservation science for 35 years, passed away at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on December 16, 2015,
December 8, 2015
December 8, 2015 —
Biologists at UC San Diego have found that a method they developed to identify and characterize new antibiotics can be employed to screen natural products quickly for compounds capable of controlling antibiotic resistant bacteria.
December 3, 2015
December 3, 2015 —
UC San Diego professors Gentry Patrick and Keith Pezzoli were among 10 University of California faculty winners announced by UC President Janet Napolitano as recipients of the Award for Outstanding Faculty Leadership in Presidential Initiatives. Napolitano made the announcement during her remarks at the UC Board of Regents on Nov. 19. These influential faculty members, from across the system, are leading the charge in important initiatives such as carbon neutrality, sustainability, food, innovation, diversity and more.
December 2, 2015
December 2, 2015 —
Wine, beer and yogurt are produced when microorganisms convert sugar into alcohol, gases or acids. But this process of fermentation—which is used by bacteria, fungi and other fast-growing cells to generate energy in the absence of oxygen—is a much less efficient way of generating energy for cells than aerobic respiration.
So why do many organisms use this seemingly wasteful strategy to generate energy instead of aerobic respiration, even when oxygen is readily available?
November 23, 2015
November 23, 2015 —
Using a groundbreaking gene editing technique, biologists at UC San Diego, working in collaboration with biologists at UC Irvine, have created a strain of mosquitoes capable of rapidly introducing malaria-blocking genes into a mosquito population through its progeny, ultimately eliminating the insects’ ability to transmit the disease to humans.
October 21, 2015
October 21, 2015 —
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered that bacteria—often viewed as lowly, solitary creatures—are actually quite sophisticated in their social interactions and communicate with one another through similar electrical signaling mechanisms as neurons in the human brain.
In a study published in this week’s advance online publication of Nature, the scientists detail the manner by which bacteria living in communities communicate with one another electrically through proteins called “ion channels.”
October 20, 2015
October 20, 2015 —
A UC San Diego study of the underground “architecture” of harvester ant nests has found that the more connected the chambers an ant colony builds near the surface entrance, the faster the ants are able to collect nearby sources of food.
The reason is simple: Increased connectivity among chambers leads to more social interactions among the ants within the nest. So when one group of ants within a colony—comprised of individuals working toward a common goal—finds a particularly good source of food, it’s able to more quickly communicate that finding to the rest of the colony.
October 15, 2015
October 15, 2015 —
A biologist at UC San Diego is one of 18 scientists nationwide who this year will receive the prestigious Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, given to promising early-career scientists from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
October 15, 2015
October 15, 2015 —
Like many faculty members at UC San Diego, Gentry Patrick arrived on campus in 2004 with sterling academic credentials: An undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellowship from Caltech.
October 8, 2015
October 8, 2015 —
With their tiny forelimbs and long hindlimbs and feet, jerboas are oddly proportioned creatures that look something like a pint-size cross between a kangaroo and the common mouse. How these 33 species of desert-dwelling rodents from Northern Africa and Asia evolved their remarkable limbs over the past 50 million years from a five-toed, quadrupedal ancestor shared with the modern mouse to the three-toed bipedal jerboa is detailed in a paper published in this week’s issue of the journal Current Biology.
