Research Stories

In April of this year the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) announced their flagship study including high-quality, near error-free, and near complete reference genome assemblies for 16 species representing six major lineages of vertebrates, including mammals, reptiles, monotremes, amphibians and fish.

While drugs help patients mitigate the most extreme conditions of mental illnesses like schizophrenia or depression, they often don’t address the cognitive deficits many diseases cause, such as memory loss, low attention span and impaired decision-making.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) professor Steve Robinson, assistant professor Jonathon Schofield, and Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior (NPB) associate professor Wilsaan Joiner are teaming up in a new four-year, $1.3 million NASA-funded project to study different visual and haptic strategies to help astronauts more safely and precisely operate ro

The laboratory of Richard McKenney, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology has published new research on the role of the KIF1A motor protein in degenerative disorders in children.

We might one day be able to treat diseases or inherited disorders by rewriting parts of the genetic code in our own cells. The National Institutes of Health established the Somatic Cell Genome Editing consortium, with funding of $190 million over six years, to advance research in genome editing, develop tools and test them in animal models before advancing to human clinical trials.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded a $15.7 million grant to the UC Davis Silvio O. Conte Center, one of only 15 Conte Centers nationwide.

Psychiatric illnesses and neurodevelopmental disorders, including schizophrenia, affect 15-20 percent of the population worldwide, yet current treatments are at best only partially effective. The UC Davis Conte Center was first established in 2016 through the Center for Neuroscience to determine how maternal infection increases risk for these disorders and to identify new targets for novel treatments.

As climate change takes hold across the Americas, some areas will get wetter, and others will get hotter and drier. A new study of the yellow warbler, a widespread migratory songbird, shows that individuals have the same climatic preferences across their migratory range. The work is published Feb. 17 in Ecology Letters.

Plants can perceive and react to light across a wide spectrum. New research from Prof. Nitzan Shabek’s laboratory in the Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences shows how plants can respond to blue light in particular.

“Plants can see much better than we can,” Shabek said.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K., have solved the structure of the complex formed when mRNA is being scanned to find the starting point for translating RNA into a protein. The discovery, published Sept.

Four years after plant sciences professor Kentaro Inoue was struck and killed while riding his bike, the last three graduate students from his lab are ensuring his scientific legacy lives on through their published research, careers in industry and academia, and mentoring of future science students.

Philip Day, Laura Klasek and Lucas McKinnon successfully completed their doctoral degrees in the past year, having continued their studies with the support of plant biology professor Steven Theg, one of Inoue’s colleagues, and the Department of Plant Sciences.