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Inside our cells are tiny engines that supply the energy to sustain life. These protein machines essentially burn our food – producing CO2 and harnessing the energy that is released to sustain growth, movement and even thought.

Each year, roughly 1.6 million people worldwide are born with genetic diseases that disrupt these tiny cellular engines – making life difficult.

“Mutations in these protein complexes are really devastating, and often lethal,” says James Letts, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology. 

The University of California, Davis, is No. 10 among the nation’s top public universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2026, published on Oct. 8.

It was one of four UC campuses ranked in the top 10 public universities in the nation.

UC Davis was 25th among more than 1,500 public and private American universities and 64th among nearly 2,200 universities from 115 countries and territories.

Each year, the CBS Dean’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) supports students who wish to stay on campus—and in the lab—over the summer term.

Normally, undergraduates leave campus for the summer if they are not enrolled in classes. They often do this to work and save funds for the start of the next academic year. SURP consists of several different donor-funded undergraduate research awards and allows students to continue their research projects over the summer.

A new study by the University of California, Davis, shows how cells work together to avoid a sudden drop in blood sugar. Understanding these feedback loops could improve the lives of people with diabetes and help them avoid dangerous hypoglycemia.

The work was published Sept. 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Almost overnight, the season changed from the usual Davis summer heat to fall, which is a welcome shift—the wind is up, the skies are a little grayer, the days are shorter and, most importantly, the students are back.

The college is very pleased to have welcomed four new faculty during the 2025 calendar year. Joining the Departments of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Evolution and Ecology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology, each new faculty member adds expertise and breadth to the college’s research and teaching portfolio.

When a woman becomes pregnant, the outcome of that pregnancy depends on many things — including a crucial event that happened while she was still growing inside her own mother’s womb. It depends on the quality of the egg cells that were already forming inside her fetal ovaries. The DNA-containing chromosomes in those cells must be cut, spliced and sorted perfectly. In males, the same process produces sperm in the testes but occurs only after puberty.

It’s early—almost too early to be out walking. But Leo Konefat, a rising third-year undergraduate at UC Davis and one of the 2025 EVE Scholars, has an urgent appointment with a low tide. On that first morning, getting up at dawn to reach the field site on time, the fog was low, the stars were overhead, and the foghorn’s low bleat in the distance offered a first glimpse of the coastal world he would be immersed in for the next ten weeks.

The UC Davis College of Biological Sciences (CBS) is launching a major revision of its introductory biology curriculum, known as the BIO123 Series, beginning this academic year. This initiative modernizes the long-standing BIS2A/B/C sequence, which was introduced in 2008 and has grown to serve over 9,000 students annually. Offering introductory biology comprises over 30% of CBS’s total student credit hours.

In a new study published in Science Advances on September 10, a team of UC Davis researchers tracked the movement of fluorescent particles inside the cells of microscopic worms, providing unprecedented insights into cellular crowding in a multicellular animal. They found that the cytoplasm inside the worms was significantly more crowded and compartmentalized than in single-celled yeast or mammalian tissue culture cells, which are more commonly used to gauge internal cellular dynamics.