Back-to-back papers in the Dec. 29 issue of Nature Plants report the first complete protein structures for plant respiratory supercomplex I+III₂. Obtaining these structures helps researchers understand basic plant biology, as well as stress responses and how biofuel crops might grow more rapidly.
When McKensey Middleton holds horse reins, every slight movement conveys something. Where she places the reins on the horse’s neck gives the horse direction, a path; a tug on them signals for the horse to stop or slow down.
“When you watch a rider, you’re really watching them communicate with the horse,” said Middleton, ’22 B.S. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. “Your legs, your voice, your hands, you’re using these things to communicate with the horse.”
In Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative dementias, proteins that normally play a role in healthy brain tissue turn bad, clumping together to form insoluble plaques and tangles as neurons wither and die. Exactly how these proteins are connected to disease — and whether they can be targeted in some way to slow, stop or reverse its progression — remains a challenging problem.
Distinguished Professor Walter Leal of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and a former chair of the Department of Entomology, was inducted as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) at a June ‘22 ceremony in Phoenix, Ariz.
Tetrahymena, a tiny single celled-organism, turns out to be hiding a surprising secret: it’s doing respiration – using oxygen to generate cellular energy – differently from other organisms such as plants, animals or yeasts. The discovery, published March 31 in Science, highlights the power of new techniques in structural biology and reveals gaps in our knowledge of a major branch of the tree of life.
When it comes to education in the biological sciences, applied learning like undergraduate research is integral to the assimilation of knowledge. Through experiences in the laboratory, students acquire new skills and reinforce learnings from the lecture hall, taking techniques from the page to the pipette and laying the foundation on which they’ll build the rest of their careers.
For some students, undergraduate research experiences may seem out of reach, but philanthropy can help provide the resources they need to participate in such important educational endeavors.
In the choreography of meiosis—the process responsible for sex cell division in all eukaryotic life—the pairing of homologous chromosomes (homologs) is essential. Errors in this process can lead to an incorrect number of chromosomes in sex cells, which can result in birth defects and miscarriages. Despite being studied for more than 100 years, mysteries about the process still abound.
The first atlas of metabolites in the mouse brain has been published by a team led by UC Davis researchers. The dataset includes 1,547 different molecules across 10 brain regions in male and female laboratory mice from adolescence through adulthood and into advanced old age. The work is published Oct. 15 in the Nature Communications. The complete dataset is publicly available at https://mouse.atlas.metabolomics.us/.
Gerald Quon, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Genome Center, has received a New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will support the development of a computational framework for characterizing how genetic variants associated with the risk of psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder work at the at the cellular level.
Rishi Sharma’s passion for community service can be traced back to his parents. While growing up in Dubai, Sharma watched his parents, who are both doctors, hone their expertise in the medical field. As his parents advanced in their careers, they never forgot about the people around them.
“They moved up the ladder, and as they did they used more of their experience to invest in the community,” said Sharma, a biochemistry and molecular biology major in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences.
