Author: UC Santa Cruz QB3

From developing diagnostic tests to conducting surveys of infection prevalence, UCSC-QB3 researchers are on the offense, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic with science. Here are the highlights.

“I think the extent to which we can show students the possibilities of contributing to public health and to health-care careers, which after all, are 20 percent of our economy, we’re going to do good things both for our local community, but more broadly for the country and the world,” Hartzog said. UCSC | Jessica…

KSBW  While doctors and nurses treat COVID-19 patients on the front lines, behind the scenes scientists are working hard in their labs to come up with ways to battle the pandemic. One thing University of California, Santa Cruz scientists are working on is to create a diagnostic testing lab on campus that will meet the…

UCSC The current flu season is shaping up to be a particularly severe one, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting 2,900 deaths from flu as of the end of December. Vaccines offer protection from this threat, but getting the flu vaccine every year can be a hassle, and many adults go…

HHMI A good scientific mentor can help students navigate different career paths and plug them into new networks. A mentor can be a sounding board and an advocate – and they can also make the experience of being a scientist more fun. That’s a goal of biologist Samara Reck-Peterson, one of 44 advisers the Howard Hughes…

June 27, 2019 | Center for Biological Diversity SACRAMENTO, Calif.— On Monday California will become the first state to ban all lead ammunition for hunting — the culmination of years of efforts to phase out toxic lead ammunition in the environment. The statewide ban will significantly decrease the risk that leftover fragments of spent lead…

Variation graphs facilitate genomic discover Katharine Miller | Inquiry UCSC After the first human genome was successfully sequenced in 2003, researchers established it as the reference genome. It became the singular, highest-quality, most well-understood, standardized genome against which all other human genomes would be mapped and compared for the foreseeable future. It turns out this commitment to a single…

Gifts from Ken and Gloria Levy support biomedical discovery that may help cancer patients as well as research on dark matter halos, some of the universe’s largest structures UCSC.edu Professor Daniel Kim’s lab works on technology it hopes will help doctors save lives, while astronomy grad student Enia Xhakaj researches some of the largest structures…

National Academy of Sciences Elects Members and Foreign Associates; Historic Number of Women Elected to Its Membership The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 100 new members and 25 foreign associates in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Forty percent of the newly elected members are women—the most…

In experiments with worms, researchers showed that epigenetic marks on sperm chromosomes affect gene expression and development in offspring UCSC.edu | March 20, 2019 | Tim Stephens As an organism grows and responds to its environment, genes in its cells are constantly turning on and off, with different patterns of gene expression in different cells.…