In December 2018, Distinguished Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan and his colleagues published in Nature a method that allowed them to produce clonal seeds directly from plants, bypassing the sexual reproduction process. Replicating this process in the lab could prove vital to providing the world’s farmers with high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-resistant food crops.

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.

Launched in 2014, the BioInnovation Group connects undergraduates to life sciences research through student-run, independent projects. From synthesizing “Real Vegan Cheese” to developing microfluidic devices, the group allows students to be the drivers of innovation.

Plant biologists at UC Davis have discovered a way to make crop plants replicate through seeds as clones. The long-sought discovery could make it easier to propagate high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-tolerant crops and make them available to the world’s farmers.

Since 2009, Gary Cherr has served as the director of the Bodega Marine Laboratory and as an associate director of the Coastal & Marine Sciences Institute. But he became an Aggie well before that.

Researchers at UC Davis and the University of Alberta, Canada, have made preliminary discoveries about how Zika and hepatitis C viruses reproduce at the cellular level, providing new insight into a family of viruses that also includes West Nile and dengue.