August 10, 2015
…core set of genes and functions that a bacterial cell needs to sustain life. The research, which answers the fundamental question of what minimum set of functions bacterial cells require to survive, could lead to new cell engineering approaches for E. coli and other microorganisms, the researchers said.
July 6, 2023
Plant and animal stem cells both rely on the cytoskeleton to divide properly, but a new study finds that they use them in opposite ways—while animal cells pull on the cytoskeleton, plant cells push it away. Harnessing that action could help scientists engineer more resilient plants.
May 7, 2024
…has discovered a new cellular mechanism that explains how cells can adapt to pressure changes during tissue growth by packing themselves into a unique shape. Researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, and the Institute of Biomedicine in Seville (IBiS) in Spain led…
April 27, 2023
Researchers have developed a biosynthetic “clock” that keeps cells from reaching normal levels of deterioration related to aging. They engineered a gene oscillator that switches between the two normal paths of aging, slowing cell degeneration and setting a record for life extension.
January 12, 2017
Biologists at UC San Diego have documented for the first time how very large viruses reprogram the cellular machinery of bacteria during infection to more closely resemble an animal or human cell—a process that allows these alien invaders to trick cells into producing hundreds of new viruses, which eventually explode…
June 18, 2015
Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have made a surprisingly simple discovery: The modification of more than 100 secreted proteins is the work of a single enzyme called Fam20C. The finding is published June 18 by Cell.
January 2, 2014
Biologists at UC San Diego have discovered an effective strategy that could prevent the human immune system from rejecting the grafts derived from human embryonic stem cells, a major problem now limiting the development of human stem cell therapies. Their discovery may also provide scientists with a better understanding of…
October 13, 2014
…destructive to tissues and cells, “free radicals” generated by the cell’s mitochondria—the energy producing structures in the cell—are actually beneficial to healing wounds. That’s the conclusion of biologists at UC San Diego who discovered that “reactive oxygen species”—chemically reactive molecules containing oxygen, such as peroxides, commonly referred to as free…
October 27, 2011
When a bacterial cell divides into two daughter cells and those two cells divide into four more daughters, then 8, then 16 and so on, the result, biologists have long assumed, is an eternally youthful population of bacteria. Bacteria, in other words, don’t age—at least not in the same way…
October 16, 2012
Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have received a $9.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a single-cell genomics center and develop a three-dimensional map of gene activities in individual cells in the human cortex.
