Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found that mutations that cause autism in children are connected to a pathway that regulates brain development.
While genomics is the study of all of the genes in a cell or organism, epigenomics is the study of all the genomic add-ons and changes that influence gene expression but aren’t encoded in the DNA sequence. A variety of new epigenomic information is now available in a collection of studies published Feb. 19 in Nature by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap Epigenomics Program.
In a remarkable new advance against the virus that causes AIDS, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have announced the creation of a novel drug candidate so potent and universally effective, it might work as part of an unconventional vaccine.
At Berkeley-Haas since 2010, Marketing Prof. Clayton Critcher continues to build his career by studying how people navigate life as economic, political, and moral beings and by shedding light on consumer behavior.
In recognition of his body of research, Prof. Critcher has received a 2015 SAGE Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology (FPSP).
While researching the two known species of seadragons as part of an effort to understand and protect the exotic and delicate fish, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego made a startling discovery: A third species of seadragon.
Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego, has been named the 2015 winner of the American Library Association’s Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award. Schottlaender, will receive a cash award and citation during the 2015 ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco this June.
Researchers have long sought alternatives to morphine – a powerful and widely used painkiller – that curb its side effects, including dependency, nausea and dizziness. Now, an experiment at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has supplied the most complete atomic-scale map of such a compound docked with a cellular receptor that regulates the body’s pain response and tolerance.
Could desalination be the answer to California’s drought? As parts of the state become drier, scientists are looking at ways to turn seawater into drinkable water.
An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, has identified the microtubule-associated protein tau (MAPT) gene as increasing the risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The MAPT gene encodes the tau protein, which is involved with a number of neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and AD. These findings provide novel insight into Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration, possibly opening the door for improved clinical diagnosis and treatment.
SLAC theoretical physicist and Stanford Professor Emeritus James D. “BJ” Bjorken has been awarded the 2015 Wolf Prize in Physics for his key role in elucidating the nature of the strong force and predicting what would happen if electrons were violently slammed into protons in the atomic nucleus.
Until recently, it was often difficult for private industry to take advantage of Berkeley Lab’s resources. That has changed with CalCharge, a unique public-private partnership uniting the California Bay Area’s emerging and established battery technology companies with critical academic and government resources.
When fighting chronic viral infections or cancers, a key division of the immune system, known as CD8 T cells, sometimes loses its ability to effectively fight foreign invaders. Overcoming so-called T cell exhaustion is crucial to treating persistent infections but the underlying molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood.
Scientists have used an X-ray laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to get the first glimpse of the transition state where two atoms begin to form a weak bond on the way to becoming a molecule.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory researchers will share the latest discoveries and innovations in a wide range of fields at this year’s AAAS Annual Meeting (Feb. 12-16 in San Jose, Calif.), including X-ray lasers, quantum materials, citizen science, new materials for electronics, cosmology visualization, computer-aided catalyst design, next-generation batteries, accelerators, advanced adaptive optics, cosmic inflation and nanoscale optical tomography.
Leading authorities and prominent keynote speakers including Norman J. Ornstein, PhD, television commentator and Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, will give inside-the-beltway insights on Health Politics and Policies Under a Republican Congress during the 24th Annual Health Care Forecast Conference. Hosted by The Paul Merage School of Business Center for Health Care Management and Policy, the conference begins Thursday, February 19 and runs through Friday, February 20 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences & Engineering on the UC Irvine campus.
A study by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute sheds significant new light on a surprising and critical role that microbes may play in nutritional disorders such as protein malnutrition.
Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have for the first time discovered a killing mechanism that could underpin a range of the most intractable neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS.
In the second pediatric heart transplant in Rady Children’s history, a team of surgeons successfully implanted a heart in 17-month-old Jahaziel Faualo from Oahu, Hawaii.
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles announced today that it will make an institutional commitment of $50 million to expand its Center for Personalized Medicine. This investment in leading-edge research and innovation will help unlock the human genome’s potential with the goal of making diagnoses more effective, therapies more targeted and health care more personalized for children. The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Board of Trustees recently approved the investment in the Center, to be disbursed over the next five years. The institution will seek an additional $50 million in philanthropic funding from the community to support the translation of research outcomes in the lab into bedside care for infants, children and adolescents.
To better understand these cellular changes and how they influence the progression and severity of glaucoma, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Shiley Eye Institute turned to a mouse model of the disease. Their study, published Feb. 10 in The Journal of Neuroscience, reveals how some types of retinal ganglion cells alter their structures within seven days of elevated eye pressure, while others do not.
Researchers working at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have captured the first X-ray portraits of living bacteria.
This milestone, reported in the Feb. 11 issue of Nature Communications, is a first step toward possible X-ray explorations of the molecular machinery at work in viral infections, cell division, photosynthesis and other processes that are important to biology, human health and our environment.
Latinos are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States, with their numbers having risen 243 percent since 1980. Yet the number of Latino physicians per 100,000 Latinos has declined by 22 percent during that period.
A University of California, San Diego School of Medicine project involving the creation of miniature models of the human brain – developed with stem cells – to study neurological disorders caused by HIV and methamphetamine use has been named one of five recipients of the 2015 Avant-Garde Award for HIV/AIDS Research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have identified a new cellular pathway affected in cystinosis, a rare genetic disorder that can result in eye and kidney damage. The findings could eventually lead to new drug treatments for reducing or preventing the onset of renal failure in patients.
The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory welcomed 20 high school teams from five San Francisco Bay Area counties to the 2015 Regional DOE Science Bowl on Feb. 7. It was the 11th time the lab hosted the annual event.
Jens Nørskov, director of the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis at Stanford and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has been named a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional distinctions for engineers.
Researchers at the UC San Diego School of Medicine will share a $12 million grant with peer institutions across the United States to better understand the factors that influence the safety of older drivers, such as physical and cognitive functions, medical conditions, medications and adoption of vehicle technologies.
Miami Herald reporters Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch have won USC Annenberg’s 2015 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, for their examination of six years of child deaths in Florida.
A protein called YAP, which drives the growth of organs during development and regulates their size in adulthood, plays a key role in the emergence of resistance to targeted cancer therapies, according to a new study led by UC San Francisco researchers.
Prominent entrepreneur Ming Hsieh and his wife Eva have made a $1 million gift to support the Children’s Orthopaedic Center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA).
To help people with hormone deficiencies, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have developed a potential new therapy based on an unlikely model: immune molecules from cows. Their research shows that human hormones and antibodies can be fused together—mimicking long, stalk-like cow antibodies.
A novel approach to growing nanowires promises a new means of control over their light-emitting and electronic properties. Berkeley Lab researchers demonstrated a new growth technique that uses specially engineered catalysts. These catalysts have given scientists more options than ever in turning the color of light-emitting nanowires.
Paul Merage, noted entrepreneur, chairman and CEO of MIG investment companies, and namesake of The Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, will give the commencement address at the 2015 business school graduation ceremony to be held Monday, June 15, 2015, in the Bren Events Center on the UC Irvine campus.
Between 5 and 8 million children in the United States have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), yet most cases go undiagnosed. To help address this issue, researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine have developed a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based technique to help clinicians and researchers better detect and evaluate NAFLD in children.
Researchers identify signaling molecules in intestinal stem cells that can lead to tumors if left unregulated. The findings suggest a new approach to targeting intestinal cancers.
A new study from China shows that nearsightedness, also called myopia, is twice as prevalent in middle-class students than poor students. This is the latest news on myopia, which has become an urgent research topic as rates of nearsightedness have increased so dramatically in the last few decades. Myopia afflicts a reported 80 to 90 percent of people in Asia and 40 percent in the U.S.
In the first study of its kind, a consortium led by UCLA physicians found that paramedics can start medications for patients in the first minutes after onset of a stroke. While the specific drug tested, magnesium sulfate, did not improve patient outcomes, the research has resulted in a new method to get promising treatments to stroke patients quickly.
Bacteria have a sophisticated means of defending themselves, and they need it: more viruses infect bacteria than any other biological entity.
Two experiments undertaken at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory provide new insight at the heart of bacterial adaptive defenses in a system called CRISPR, short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have found diverse genomic changes in single neurons from the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, pointing to an unexpected factor that may underpin the most common form of the disease.
New findings, published today by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, open the door to the development of new therapies to block or decrease cognitive decline due to HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), estimated to affect 10 to 50 percent of aging HIV sufferers to some degree.
FDA has approved IBRANCE (palbociclib), representing a new treatment method to arrest tumor growth in certain advanced breast cancer patients. IBRANCE targets a key family of proteins responsible for cell growth. Results of a phase 2 study found the combination of IBRANCE and letrozole improved progression-free survival by 10 months as compared to letrozole alone. Over 80 percent of metastatic ER+ breast cancer patients received some benefit from this treatment.
Seeking to boldly go where medical science has not gone before, the Clinical and Translational Research Institute (CTRI) at the University of California, San Diego has been named the official testing site for the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a global competition sponsored by the Qualcomm Foundation to develop a consumer-friendly, mobile device capable of diagnosing and interpreting 15 physiological conditions and capturing vital health metrics.
Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have uncovered the workings of cell-protection device, one that may play a major role in a number of age-related diseases, including diabetes and Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.