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Michele La Merrill was named one of the 12 Chancellor's Fellows this year. Chancellor's Fellows receive funding to conduct research in their respective fields and teach students to become critical thinkers. Michele La Merrill, of the Department of Environmental Toxicology and the Genome Center, investigates how environmental exposure to chemicals can impact people's risk for metabolic diseases.

Read the full press release here.

The Earth BioGenome Project, launched in 2018, is moving from planning and pilot projects to major production sequencing. The goal of the project is to complete reference genomes for all species of eurkaryotic life on Earth: animals, plants, fungi, algae and other organisms that package their DNA into a nucleus.

C. Titus Brown was named a 2021-2022 Public Scholarship Faculty Fellow by UC Davis. C. Titus Brown is a Genome Center faculty member and an associate professor in the Department of Population Health, School of Veterinary Medicine. The Public Scholarship program supports faculty members in developing publicly engaged research.

Megan Dennis is one of the recipients of a 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. An NSF CAREER Award is NSF's most prestigious grant in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. With five years of support, Dennis' research will focus on transcriptional regulation of primate genes and research opportunities for high school and first-generation undergraduate students.  

Scientists are a step closer to breeding plants with genes from only one parent. New research led by plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, published Nov. 19 in Science Advances, shows the underlying mechanism behind eliminating half the genome and could make for easier and more rapid breeding of crop plants with desirable traits such as disease resistance.

Clarivate's 2021 list of Highly Cited Researchers recognizes scientists whose papers rank in the top 1% of citations in the field and in Web of Science. Three of the top ten highly-cited scientists at UC Davis are members of the Genome Center. We congratulate Siobhan Brady, Jonathan Eisen, and Oliver Fiehn for their contributions and dedication to their respective fields. 

A recent publication in Scientific Reports by Brydges et al. titled "Indoxyl sulfate, a gut microbiome-derived uremic toxin, is associated with psychic anxiety and its functional magnetic resonance imaging-based neurologic signature" investigated whether indoles in the gut microbiome are associated with depression and anxiety. The study found that abundance of indoles is correlated with anxiety, but anxiety treatment was not related to the modulation of indoles in the gut.

UC Davis’s asymptomatic COVID-19 testing program completed its one millionth test this week, a little more than a year since the campus began offering tests to on-campus students, faculty and staff in mid-September 2020.

“Our asymptomatic testing program was the original foundation of the university’s COVID-19 strategy and, along with vaccination, continues to be central to our mitigation efforts,” said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Mary Croughan.

The first atlas of metabolites in the mouse brain has been published by a team led by UC Davis researchers. The dataset includes 1,547 different molecules across 10 brain regions in male and female laboratory mice from adolescence through adulthood and into advanced old age. The work is published Oct. 15 in the Nature Communications. The complete dataset is publicly available at https://mouse.atlas.metabolomics.us/.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced the award of 106 grants to support highly innovative and broadly impactful biomedical or behavioral research via the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, which funds highly innovative proposals that may struggle in traditional peer-reviewed grants due to the high risk of the proposal.

By Pamela Reynolds and Jessica Nusbaum

The Delta variant is driving a surge in hospital admissions and straining ICUs around the world. Under such conditions, accurately anticipating demand for hospital resources can mean the difference between timely treatment and, in some cases, between life and death. When and how are COVID-related admissions rates likely to change, and by how much? And how far in advance can we make such predictions accurately?

A recent publication in Med by Mysore et al. titled "Protective heterologous T cell immunity in COVID-19 induced by the trivalent MMR and Tdap vaccine antigens" found that T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2, MMR, and Tdap vaccine proteins are highly correlated. This indicates that those with prior MMR or Tdap vaccination may have reduced COVID-19 severity.

The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU) selected Luis Carvajal-Carmona as a fellow for the third cohort of the Presidential Leadership Academy. The prestigious one-year HACU program is designed to prepare the next generation of culturally diverse leaders for executive and senior-level positions in higher education.

The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, through the ADVANCE Program and its Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) announced Luis Carvajal-Carmona as one of the 2021 ADVANCE Scholar Award recipients.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, or APLU, has honored the University of California, Davis, for its response through Healthy Davis Together to the coronavirus pandemic.

UC Davis joined one other institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as the inaugural winners of the APLU Research Response to a Community in Crisis Award, announced Thursday (July 1).