The NIH has allocated US$190 million over 6 years in support of the Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) Consortium, which now includes 72 principal investigators from 38 institutions that are pursuing 45 distinct but well-integrated projects. The Genome Center professor David Segal is part of three projects at UC Davis, along with Alice Tarantal, Dennis Hartigan-O'Connor, Kit Lam, and R. Holland Cheng. A paper describing this effort appears in the April 8, 2021 issue of Nature.
Fereydoun Hormozdiari was recently awarded an NSF CAREER award for "Computational methods to improve our understanding of the diversity of genomic structural variation." As part of this project, Hormozdiari's Lab will develop novel methods for efficient and accurate discovery and genotyping of any structural variant using ever-changing sequencing technologies. This will provide the necessary methods for studying a diverse set of structural variants (including hard to detect and complex structural variants) using these technologies.
The Academic Senate Committee on Public Service has recognized Richard Michelmore, director of the Genome Center and distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, for his outstanding contributions and commitment to public service with the 2020-21 Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award.
In a year of great uncertainty, Michelmore demonstrated exceptional vision, leadership, and scholarly excellence by spearheading the development of methods for the universal testing of the SARS-Cov-2 viroid at the Genome Center on the UC Davis campus.
Siobhan Brady was recently profiled on The Scientist, where readers learn more about Brady's research background, beginning with her childhood interest in heavy metals and culminating in her current work on gene expression and regulation in tomato.
UC Davis Virologist Samuel L. Díaz-Muñoz, an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, spoke with KCRA 3 in an interview late last year about the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines being hailed “as game-changers” by the medical community.
The community-based approach for keeping Davis residents as well as university staff and students healthy was recently highlighted by the New York Times. In contrast to other universities, which have focused on testing only students and employees, UC Davis had a larger vision: to keep the whole community healthy.
Eleven UC Davis professors have been elected in this year’s class of fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Faculty from the Genome Center include Jonathan Eisen, Daniel Kliebenstein, Pablo Ross, and Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra. Congratulations!
