San in Biological News

UC San Diego engineer provides insights to decades-old DNA squabble

A group of nanoengineers, biologists and physicists have used innovative approaches to deduce the internal structure of chromatin, a key player in DNA regulation, to reconcile a longstanding controversy in this field. This new finding could unlock the mystery behind the origin of many diseases suc...

AAAS Pacific division scientific conference to meet in San Francisco Aug. 14 - 19

WHAT: The American Association for the Advancement of Science's Pacific Division will convene its 2009 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, bringing together scholars from the Western U.S. to share their work. Marking 150 years since publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the ...

UC San Diego's $3 million NSF grant to fund science festivals

The University of California, San Diego has received a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the 2010 San Diego Science Festival and fund the creation and growth of Science Festivals nationwide. The grant award follows the highly successful first annual San Diego S...

UT San Antonio researcher wins $917,000 from NIH to study memory

San Antonio Every 16 hours, give or take, the brain's hippocampus makes six to nine thousand new neurons in the dentate gyrus, the portion of the brain which is believed to play a significant role in the preservation of episodic, or autobiographical, memory. But how do those neurons store info...

UTSA wins San Antonio Area Foundation grant to further chlamydia research

San Antonio Ashlesh Murthy, the newest research assistant professor in the South Texas Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (STCEID) at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), has received a $32,000 grant from the Semp Russ Foundation of the San Antonio Area Foundation to study the role...

Regional partnership to develop algal biofuels gets backing of San Diego leaders

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders today joined UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox, local scientists and industry leaders to announce their support for a regional partnership designed to develop innovative ways to turn algae into biofuels. Speaking at a news conference on the UC San Diego campus...

New method developed by UC San Diego bioengineers gives regenerative medicine a boost

Bioengineers at UC San Diego have developed a breakthrough method for sequencing-based methylation profiling, which could help fuel personalized regenerative medicine and even lead to more efficient and cost-effective methods for studying certain diseases. To do this, the researchers, led by K...

UC San Diego bioengineering professor trey ideker wins 2009 Overton Prize

University of California, San Diego bioengineering professor Trey Idekera network and systems biology pioneerhas won the International Society for Computational Biology's Overton Prize. The Overton prize is awarded each year to an early-to-mid-career scientist who has already made a significant co...

UC San Diego senior named Churchill Scholar for extraordinary undergraduate research

Vikram Juneja, a UC San Diego senior, has been named the first Churchill Scholar at the university and he will use the $50,000 award to complete a one-year graduate program at Cambridge University, where he will work on a master's thesis on cancer stem cell research. Juneja, a mechanical engine...

UC San Diego and Genentech scientists develop potentially disruptive antibody sequencing technology

Bioinformatics researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Genentech have developed a new, quicker way to sequence monoclonal antibodies a process that is many times faster than the sequencing technology typically used by academic and industry researchers today. The breakthroug...

UC San Diego researchers use metagene 'portraits' to reveal distinct stages of kidney formation

In the art world, the most successful portraits are often those that reveal the true essence of the subject a subject that on canvas, at least, will never age. In the science world, researchers are relying on portraits of gene expression patterns but, in this case, the images are helping to reve...

Animal and biological science highlights: San Antonio Fluid Dynamics Conference, Nov. 23-25

November 13, 2008 -- From dolphins to clams to flying creatures like hummingbirds and bats, many of nature's most fascinating creatures exhibit forms of fluid flow. When the 61st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics takes place from November 23-25 at the...

CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

The CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium features the latest findings in laboratory, translational and clinical breast cancer research. This year's meeting focuses on new and promising therapeutic approaches, as well as strides being made in diagnosing and preventing breast cancer. To ...

Field-hospital-on-a-chip project awarded to nanoengineer from UC San Diego

With a $1.6M grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), UC San Diego NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang will lead a project to create a "field hospital on a chip" that soldiers can wear on the battlefield. The automated sense-and-treat system will continuously monitor a soldier's s...

UC San Diego bioengineers fill holes in science of cellular self-organization

The chemical and biological aspects of cellular self-organization are well-studied; less well understood is how cell populations order themselves biomechanically how their behavior and communication are affected by high density and physical proximity. Bioengineers and physicists at the University...

NIH doles out $3M in new innovator awards to 2 UC San Diego faculty

Two faculty members at the University of California, San Diego have received New Innovator Awards from the National Institutes of Health, awards intended to accelerate the translation of cutting-edge science and research to improvements in human health. Karen Christman, assistant professor of...

Generation innovation: Young UC San Diego bioengineer to use NIH grant to fuel tissue engineering

At 30, Karen Christman, an assistant bioengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, plans to help fuel the growing field of tissue engineering. With a new $1.5 million New Innovator Award grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Christman will be able to do j...

31st Annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

What: The CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium features the latest cutting-edge findings in laboratory, translational and clinical breast cancer research. This year's meeting focuses on new and promising therapeutic approaches, as well as strides being made in diagnosing and preventing...

UC San Diego researchers could help US military thwart explosive threats

Researchers at UC San Diego are using statistical pattern recognition and image processing to help the U.S. military better detect hidden roadside explosives. Under a grant funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through the National Science Foundation, UC San Diego structural engine...

UC San Diego launches Institute of Engineering in Medicine to accelerate health care tech

The world's top engineers, physicians and scientists are joining forces to conceptualize, develop and bring to reality the future tools and treatments of 21st century health care through UC San Diego's new Institute of Engineering in Medicine. Nanoparticle bombs to kill cancer, molecular-sized bri...

UC San Diego researchers identify potential new drug candidates to combat 'bird flu'

As the specter of a worldwide outbreak of avian or "bird flu" lingers, health officials recognize that new drugs are desperately needed since some strains of the virus already have developed resistance to the current roster of anti-flu remedies. Now, a team of UC San Diego scientists - with the...

Glowing films developed by UC San Diego chemists reveal traces of explosives

New spray-on films developed by UC San Diego chemists will be the basis of portable devices that can quickly reveal trace amounts of nitrogen-based explosives. Contaminated fingerprints leave dark shadows on the films, which glow blue under ultraviolet light. One of the films can distinguish be...

UC San Diego researchers eliminate drug discovery bottleneck

Determining the structure of unknown natural compounds is a slow and expensive part of drug screening and development but this may now change thanks to a new combination of experimental and computational protocols developed at the University of California, San Diego and presented at RECOMB 2008 (...

Biologists at UC San Diego identify key protein in cell's 'self-eating' function

Molecular biologists at the University of California, San Diego have found one piece of the complex puzzle of autophagy, the process of self-eating performed by all eukaryotic cells -- cells with a nucleus -- to keep themselves healthy. Their finding, published in the March 11 issue of the jour...

DHS Begins Collecting 10 Fingerprints From International Visitors at San Francisco International Airport

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today that it has begun collecting additional fingerprints from international visitors arriving at San Francisco International Airport (San Francisco). The change is part of the department's upgrade fr...

UC San Diego begins trading greenhouse gas credits on Chicago Climate Exchange

The University of California, San Diego has become the first campus on the West Coast to join the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), North Americas only voluntary, legally binding trading system to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. UC San Diego is only the seventh university in the nation to join...

Experimental Biology 2008 meets in San Diego April 5-9

What: More than 12,000 biological and biomedical scientists will gather for Experimental Biology 2008. This annual meeting, now in its 17th year, brings together scientists from dozens of different disciplines, from laboratory to translational to clinical research, from throughout the United Sta...

UC San Diego physicists tackle knotty puzzle

Electrical cables, garden hoses and strands of holiday lights seem to get themselves hopelessly tangled with no help at all. Now research initiated by an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego has resulted in the first model of how knots form. The study, published thi...

UC San Diego biologists solve plant growth hormone enigma

Gardeners and farmers have used the plant hormone auxin for decades, but how plants produce and distribute auxin has been a long-standing mystery. Now researchers at the University of California, San Diego have found the solution, which has valuable applications in agriculture. The study, publ...

UC San Diego partners with Venter Institute to build marine microbial genomics cyberinfrastructure

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will build a state-of-the-art computational resource and develop software tools to decipher the genetic code of communities of microbial life in the world's oceans. The new resource will help scientists understand how microbes functio...

Grasping metaphors: UC San Diego research ties brain area to figures of speech

What does it take to fathom a proverb ?catch the figurative meaning of "an apple doesn't fall far from the tree"? According to research led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, a region of the brain known as the angular...

Advances in lung cancer research announced at conference

... Thoracic Oncology at TGen Clinical Research Services at Scottsdale Healthcare, made both announcements at the 13th World Conference on Lung Cancer in san Francisco. In one presentation, Dr. Weiss described research that eventually could help prevent lung cancer from spreading to the brain. In non-sma...

AGU journal highlights -- Aug. 6, 2009

...er Gerstoft: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, san Diego, La Jolla, California, USA. Source: Geophysical Research Letters ...dena, California, USA; Bruce Cantor: Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., san Diego, California, USA. Source: Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) pap...

Moving to the US increases cancer risk for Hispanics

... Cancer Prevention and Population Studies research program at the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at san Antonio. The Hispanic population in the United States is increasing according to Ramirez nearly one in every three people will be Hispanic by 2050...

Sustainable agriculture at the ESA Annual Meeting

...er (ACC): Jerry Glover: Symposium 9 - From Genes to Watersheds: Developing a Post-Contemporary Agriculture (1888-2058). Tuesday, Aug. 4, 3:10 pm., san Miguel, ACC Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer: COS 34 - Agroecology, Agroforestry, and Biofuels I. Tuesday, Aug. 4, 3:40 p.m., Taos room, ACC Shashi Kumar: PS ...

La Jolla Institute discovers novel tumor suppressor

... san DIEGO (August 3, 2009) La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology researc...e C- 3 via SHP-1-Mediated Dephosphorylation of STAT5." Researchers from UC san Diego Cancer Center, University of Alabama and the University of Western On...

August 2009 Geology and GSA Today media highlights

..., South Africa -- Implications for the Permian-Triassic boundary Andrea Fildani et al., Chevron Energy Technology Company, 6001 Bollinger Canyon Rd, san Ramon, California 94583, USA. Pages 719-722. The most extreme biological crisis on Earth, the end-Permian mass extinction, is recorded in terrestri...

Biologists rediscover endangered frog population

...a nearly extinct frog has been rediscovered in the san Bernardino National Forest's san Jacinto Wilderness. Biologists from the U.S. Geolo...ites to re-establish frogs and scientists from the san Diego Natural History Museum retracing a 1908 natu...

URI researcher sheds light on 'man-eating' squid; finds them timid, nonthreatening

... KINGSTON, R.I. July 23, 2009 News reports last week about scuba divers off san Diego being menaced by large numbers of Humboldt's or jumbo squid have raised the ire of University of Rhode Island biologist Brad Seibel. As a leadi...

DOE-funded research projects win 46 R&D 100 Awards for 2009

...with unique flight capabilities that permit remote, reusable and safe operation for sensor platforms. (Jointly with First Alliance Technologies LLC of san Ramon, Calif. and Hystar Aerospace Corp. of Vancouver, Canada) Artificial Retina - With this device, bio-electronic integrated circuits transform...