Blog

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.

Read the full article on The Scientist here.

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.

UC Davis is “passing the COVID test with flying colors,” MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle said, using a play on words as she concluded a recent interview with Professor Brad Pollock, associate dean for public health sciences, about the university’s COVID-19 testing program.

Scientists last week announced a big step forward in predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins based only on their amino acid sequence.

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!

Read the full article here.

Eleven UC Davis researchers have been named in the annual Highly Cited Researchers 2020 list released by the Web of Science Group, which compiles statistics on scientific publishing. The list identifies scientists and social scientists who have published multiple papers ranking in the top 1 percent by citations in a particular field and year, over a 10-year period.

This recent publication by Chen et al. in Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions presented a high-quality reference genome sequence of Verticillium dahliae race 1 isolate VdLs.16, which is an important fungal pathogen of crop and ornamental plants. This resource is a building block for future research on pathogenicity and population diversity.

Congratulations to Arpana Vaniya for being named one of the Trailblazers in Mentoring at the 2020 Million Women Mentors Summit.

Pamela Ronald, distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis, and with the UC Davis Genome Center, has been named a 2020 World Agriculture Prize laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences, or GCHERA. She becomes the first woman whose work is recognized by the award.

Patrick Shih, a biologist who studies the evolution of enzymes that play a central role in taking carbon out of the atmosphere, has been awarded a 2020 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Read the full article here.

A recent publication in Cell Host & Microbe by Lal et al. investigated the molecular mechanisms by which plant pathogens manipulate autophagy to increase pathogenicity. The authors found that Pseudomonas syringae HrpZ1, HopF3, and AvrPtoB alter autophagy to enhance infection.

The University of California, Davis, has been awarded $20 million as part of a multi-institutional collaboration to establish an institute focused on enabling the next-generation food system through the integration of artificial intelligence, or AI, technologies. The award is part of a larger investment announced today (Aug. 26) by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, in partnership with several federal agencies — distributing a total of $140 million to fund seven complementary AI research institutes across the nation.