Professor Graham Coop and postdoctoral researcher Michael “Doc” Edge, both of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, warn that these “direct to consumer” DNA testing services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking.
As director of the Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute, Richard Grosberg oversees an interdisciplinary body that includes membership from the College of Biological Sciences, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the College of Letters and Science, the College of Engineering, the School of Law, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Graduate School of Management.
Sexual determination and differentiation work in myriad ways across the animal kingdom. In vertebrates, like mammals and fish, sexual determination leads to the development of either ovaries or testis. These organs then secrete hormones that go on to govern the sexual development of the rest of the organism’s body. Insects are a completely different beast.
Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.
In a new study, UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Didem Sarikaya and her colleagues analyzed egg-laying strategies of 65 different Hawaiian Drosophila species and found that egg-laying capacities diverged in response to their unique environments, which directly affected the number of cells involved in each species’ ovarian development.
Population Biology Ph.D. student Victoria Morgan uses genetics to understand how land crabs adapted to living on land. Her research has taken her all the way to Christmas Island, home to the annual Christmas lsland Red Crab migration.
The combination of a big population, good genes and luck helps explain how a species of fish in Texas’ Houston Ship Channel was able to adapt to what normally would be lethal levels of toxins for most other species, according to a study to be published May 3 in the journal Science.
Scientists have successfully sequenced the coast redwood and giant sequoia genomes, completing the first major milestone of a five-year project to develop the tools necessary to study these forests’ genomic diversity.
Assistant Professor Rachael Bay was recently selected as a 2019 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Ocean Sciences. She'll use the funding to further her research on thermal tolerance in corals.
