Molecular biology Professor Chris Amemiya and his former graduate student Molly Phillips have made a discovery that upends traditional ideas about a structural polysaccharide called chitin that is found in some fish.
UC Merced is rapidly gaining a strong reputation for research and scientific computing across many disciplines and a major expansion of its computing infrastructure is about to cement the campus’ status as a research computing hub.
Having had the common cold appears to have programmed some people’s immune cells to recognize the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
That discovery — by an immunology team that includes a UC Merced alumnus — could change scientists’ understanding of the virus behind the current pandemic.
Since 2011, the Hellman Fellows Fund has provided close to 60 UC Merced assistant professors with much-needed research support in the form of seed funding. The prestigious Hellman Fellowship has launched countless careers at UC Merced and across the UC system.
Now, thanks to a generous new $3.5 million gift from the Hellman family, UC Merced will permanently establish the UC Merced Society of Hellman Fellows starting in 2021. The endowment allows the program to continue in perpetuity, while affording the campus more flexibility in funding early-career research.
Maybe now more than ever, scientists need to understand the immune system.
A new National Institutes of Health grant is funding a cross-disciplinary collaboration between bioengineering Professor Joel Spencer and immunology Professor Jennifer Manilay that will allow them to watch as immune-system cells develop in the bone marrow of a living mouse to gain insights into how they work.
Many of the items people use in their everyday lives, from baby clothes and Halloween costumes to furniture, are doused with chemical flame retardants designed to make the items safer.
Breakthrough collaborative science by an interdisciplinary team of researchers brought together by computational biology Professor David Ardell promises a new approach for treating all types of infections.
Infections have become more dangerous in recent years because bacteria and parasites rapidly evolve resistance to the medicines.
Bioengineering Professor Victor Muñoz has answered a long-standing genetic mystery, and his research suggests that someday, bioengineers could devise ways to control gene activity — manually switching off the genes that contribute to cancer, for instance.
“If this mechanism turns out to be as powerful as we anticipate, engineering it will be relatively straightforward,” Muñoz said. “Controlling the output of genes could be done in a targeted way by new genome editing technologies such as CRISPR.”
Professor Joel Spencer was a rising star in college soccer and now he is an emerging scientist in the world of biomedical engineering, capturing — for the first time — an image of a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) within the bone marrow of a living organism.
Professor Jing Xu and her students study extremely tiny motor proteins, but their work could make a huge contribution to the growing body of knowledge about Alzheimer’s and other diseases that progressively destroy brain tissue.
