President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a federal research effort designed to help researchers answer fundamental questions about how the brain works, has in recent months awarded scientists at UC San Diego with more than $10 million in grants, cementing the campus’s reputation as one of the world’s top centers for neuroscience research.
Two professors of psychiatry at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have been honored by the New York City-based Brain & Behavior Research Foundation for their work studying the genetics, dysfunction and treatment of schizophrenia, a chronic and severe brain disorder affecting roughly 1 percent of the general population or approximately 3 million people.
Accessing two previously untapped streams of satellite data, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and their colleagues have created a new map of the world’s seafloor, creating a much more vivid picture of the structures that make up the deepest, least-explored parts of the ocean. Thousands of previously uncharted mountains rising from the seafloor and new clues about the formation of the continents have emerged through the new map, which is twice as accurate as the previous version produced nearly 20 years ago.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have, for the first time, clearly defined the epidemiology of gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), which occur primarily in the lining of the stomach and small intestine. One key finding: Patients of Asian descent, who have not previously been identified as an at-risk population, are 1.5 times more likely than other patient groups to be diagnosed with this type of tumor.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a microRNA molecule as a surprisingly crucial player in managing cell survival and growth. The findings underscore the emerging recognition that non-coding RNAs help regulate basic cellular processes and may be key to developing new drugs and therapies.
The RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB), which recently archived its 100,000th molecule structure, has introduced a free mobile application device that enables users from the general public and expert researchers to quickly search and visualize the 3D shapes of proteins, nucleic acids, and molecular machines.
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