Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have developed the first mice that lack the Upf3b gene, providing a new model for studying its underlying role in intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Using a form of low-impulse electrical stimulation to the brain, documented by neuroimaging, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System (VASDHS) and collaborators elsewhere, report significantly improved neural function in participants with mild traumatic brain injury (TBI).
As the University of California San Diego’s second college, John Muir College admitted its first students in 1967. 50 years later, the college is celebrating its golden anniversary with a year-long series of festive events. Muir’s current students and alumni are invited to the college for a kick-off festival for the reveal of the time capsule sealed and buried by the founding class from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 2. Other events include a talk from one of the college’s founding faculty, Irwin Jacobs, a week of celebratory events for John Muir’s birthday, which coincides with the campus’s Earth Month activities, as well as an environmental conference featuring Muir biographer Donald Worster.
A team of researchers has engineered smart protein molecules that can reprogram white blood cells to ignore a self-defense signaling mechanism that cancer cells use to survive and spread in the body. Researchers say the advance could lead to a new method of re-engineering immune cells to fight cancer and infectious diseases. The team successfully tested this method in a live cell culture system.
The Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at UC San Diego established the Alan Turing Memorial Scholarship in 2015 to encourage a more diverse community in computer science education and research. The award honors the memory of Alan Turing, the mathematician and cryptanalyst who founded the field of computer science. During World War II, he devised the techniques that led to breaking codes produced by Germany’s Enigma machine—a breakthrough credited with accelerating the Allied victory by more than a year. After the war, he was persecuted for being gay. He died by his own hand in 1954.
Cancers driven by mutations in the KRAS gene are among the most deadly. For decades, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to directly target mutant KRAS proteins as a means to treat tumors. Instead of targeting mutant KRAS itself, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine are now looking for other genes or molecules that, when inhibited, kill cancer cells only when KRAS is also mutated.
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