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.
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.
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.
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.
The mind of a fruit fly encompasses 125,000 nerve cells, squeezed into the space of a poppy seed. At first glance, the fly brain looks nothing like a human brain. But many of the underlying neural circuits are surprisingly similar.
Fumika Hamada, a professor of neurobiology, physiology, and behavior, is using fruit flies to study a critical but oft-overlooked brain function: the regulation of our body temperature in a consistent daily rhythm.
Although teaching is a core part of being a professor, most academics learn how to teach on the job. CBS’s Future Undergraduate Science Educators (FUSE) program is changing that.
In the college, undergraduate students don’t just learn from textbooks—they actively contribute to new scientific knowledge through hands-on research. This experiential learning is a hallmark of a UC Davis education, especially in the life sciences.
For his outstanding commitment to ensuring undergraduate students have these meaningful and immersive research experiences, Chang‑il Hwang, an associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, has received a 2025 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research.
The single-celled parasite Entamoeba histolytica infects 50 million people each year, killing nearly 70,000. Usually, this wily, shape-shifting amoeba causes nothing worse than diarrhea. But sometimes it triggers severe, even fatal disease by chewing ulcers in the colon, liquefying parts of the liver and invading the brain and lungs.
Three faculty affiliated with the College of Biological Sciences are among the eight UC Davis faculty newly elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, announced March 27. They are: Frédéric Chédin, a professor and chair in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology; Dario Cantù, a professor in the Department of Viticulture and Enology; and Huaijun Zhou, a professor in the Department of Animal Science.
