News Articles

The success of E. coli bacteria depends on their ability to multiply very rapidly by dividing into new cells. The bacteria can divide as quickly as they can make an entire new copy of their DNA while minimizing errors. New work from researchers at the University of California, Davis College of Biological Sciences answers a key question about how E. coli fixes damage to DNA in the middle of duplicating it.

This story has been adapted from recent news releases from the UC Davis Newsroom.  

Doing good and fostering social mobility helped put the University of California, Davis, in the No. 2 spot among public universities and 11th among all national universities in the Washington Monthly 2022 College Guide and Rankings released in August.

The U.S. Department of Energy is funding a project at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences to study the function of genes that regulate growth and wood formation in poplar trees. The three-year, $2.5 million project is led by Nitzan Shabek, assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Biology together with Andrew Groover at the USDA Pacific Southwest Research Station in Davis and Justin Walley, Iowa State University.

Each year, CBS undergraduates who have demonstrated exceptional academic performance are invited to join the Phi Sigma Biological Sciences Honor Society, Gamma Delta Chapter. Each year’s cohort of student leadership help engage with and administer society activities.

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.

Fertility is finite for mammalian females. From birth, females possess a limited number of primordial follicles that are collectively called the ovarian reserve. Within each follicle is an oocyte that eventually becomes an egg. But with age, the viability of the ovarian reserve decreases.

“Despite its fundamental importance, our understanding how the ovarian reserve is established and maintained remains poor,” said UC Davis Professor Satoshi Namekawa, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Deep evolution casts a longer shadow than previously thought, scientists report in a new paper published Aug. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The University of California, Davis, reached a major milestone attracting $1.07 billion in external research funding in the fiscal year 2021-22, up $102.9 million from the previous record set last year. In doing so, UC Davis joins an exclusive group of fewer than 20 public universities in the nation surpassing $1 billion in research funding.

Coral reefs are home to a spectacular variety of fish. A new study by biologists at the University of California, Davis, shows that much of this diversity is driven by a relatively recent innovation among bony fish — feeding by biting prey from surfaces. The work was published the week of July 25 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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.