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Claire Tomlin Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Claire Tomlin, a biological faculty engineer in the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The prestigious 239-year old honorary society recognizes accomplished scholars, scientists, and artists in academia, the humanities, arts, business, and government. Tomlin’s research, which is currently conducted primarily at UC Berkeley, where she is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, explores complex systems that have discrete event dynamics as well as continuous time dynamics. Her group studies many topics and problems that can be modeled by hybrid systems as well as more general robotics,…
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KDM5 Deficiency Alters Gut Microbiome, Social Behavior in Flies
Genome-wide association (GWAS) and familial studies have found mutations that disrupt the function of KDM5 proteins in patients with autism spectrum disorders and related intellectual disabilities. Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division researchers Jian-Hua Mao, Antoine Snijders, and Susan Celniker, in collaboration with a team of scientists led by Xingyin Liu at Nanjing Medical University (NMU) in China, used genetic tools in Drosophila to delineate how KDM5 contributes to autism and intellectual disability.
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A New Mouse Model for Studying Stomach Cancer
An international team led by researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Biosciences Area has identified a new laboratory mouse strain for studying gastric cancer. The mouse lineage is part of a population called the Collaborative Cross (CC) mouse model that was bred to have greater genetic diversity than previous populations, so as to be more comparable with humans. The team monitored hundreds of mice from different CC strains for one year and observed that one line spontaneously developed tumors—stomach and lymphoid being the most prevalent types—at an extremely high rate. Subsequent genetic analysis of the tumors in this cancer-prone line revealed that…
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Biosciences Area FY19 LDRD Projects
The projects of 13 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY19 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The funded projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including the harnessing of microbiome data to uncover patterns of mutualism, evaluating radiobiological effects of laser-accelerated ion beams, improving bioenergy yield under drought stress, and the application of machine learning in tomogram segmentation. Lab-wide, 89 projects were selected from a field of 158 proposals. Biosciences Area efforts account for 15.07 percent of the $22.2 million allocated.
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Cancer Researcher Mina Bissell Receives Two Top Honors
Mina Bissell, a distinguished scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been selected to receive two prestigious awards for her pioneering contributions to breast cancer biology and medicine. Her research challenged existing dogma by showing that malignant cells behave much differently in a culture than they do in a body. Bissell’s “Dynamic Reciprocity” model asserts that the support molecules within tissues communicate directly with local cells, thus altering gene expression. Her model has amassed impressive supporting evidence in the 40 years since it was first proposed, and has led to an ever-growing number of…
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