Congratulations Shou-Wei Ding Professor, Molecular Virology and Immunology Noel Keen Award Recipient Please join the IIGB and CEPCEB community in congratulating Professor Shou-Wei Ding, the awardee of the 2020 Noel Keen award! This is the most prestigious award from the American Phytopathological Society (APS) for contributions to Molecular Plant Pathology, and the first time that...
Peter Atkinson and Linda Walling have received funding from DARPA to develop gene editing technology in whitefly for the benefit of agriculture. This two year grant will build on work from initially obtained seed money from the UCR Senate and RED. Drs. Atkinson and Walling’s project also benefited from the assistance of several very talented...
IIGB/CEPCEB saw unprecedented participation at the ASPB’s Plant Biology 2019 Conference in San Jose, California. CEPCEB’s own Wenbo Ma was a major symposia organizer of this year’s conference and delivered two talks, “Plant Disease and Resistance Mechanisms Major Symposium Overview by Organizer” and “Trans-kingdom RNAi executed by Secondary Small RNAs confers disease resistance” Other faculty...
Congratulations to former IIGB and CEPCEB Director Natasha Raikhel who was appointed honorary doctor at SLU’s Faculty of Forest Sciences. Find the full press release here.
CEPCEB awarded two Senior Division prizes at the California State Science and Engineering Fair Awards on Tuesday, April 30, 2019. These awards recognize scientific achievement in the fields of cell and molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics or technology development that will impact our understanding of plant cell biology. Special congratulations to David He of San Diego...
An international research team led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology has found that malaria parasite genomes are shaped by parasite-specific gene families, and that this genome organization strongly correlates with the parasite’s virulence. Study results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
IIGB's Hailing Jin has secured a four-year grant aimed at halting the spread of a deadly bacterial disease that continues to spread among California’s citrus trees. The award of nearly $4 million, which comes from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will help cure citrus trees affected by...
A team led by plant pathologist, Hailing Jin has identified a regulatory, genetic mechanism in plants that could lead to better strategies for protecting crops. Working on Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant widely used by biologists as a model species, Jin’s research team found that Argonaute protein, a major core protein in the RNA...
Mutualisms, which are interactions between members of different species that benefit both parties, are found everywhere — from exchanges between pollinators and the plants they pollinate, to symbiotic interactions between us and our beneficial microbes. Natural selection — the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring —...
CEPCEB celebrated its 16th Annual Symposium and Awards Ceremony on November 30, 2018. Christina Smolke, Professor of Bioengineering, and by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, served as the Distinguished Noel T. Keen Lecturer. Christina’s research focuses on developing modular genetic platforms for programming information processing and control functions in living systems, and she...
Natasha Raikhel was chosen as subject of ASPB News “Luminaries” column, where student and postdoc members are invited to submit their ideas for a 500- to 750-word interview they might like to conduct with a prominent scientist. The content of the interview is reproduced below: Natasha Raikhel Distinguished Professor of Plant Cell Biology Emerita, University...
Julia Bailey-Serres and Sean Cutler were named by Clarivate Analytics as 2017 Highly Cited Researchers, an annual list recognizing leading researchers in the sciences and social sciences from around the world. The final new list contains about 3,400 Highly Cited Researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences. The 2017 list focuses on...
Naoki Yamanaka will study the role of steroid hormone transporters in insect development and reproduction. An Assistant Professor of Entomology, Yamanaka will translate that knowledge into new ways to combat the spread of mosquitoes, which are among the deadliest animals on the planet. Steroid hormones mediate many biological processes, including growth and development in insects...
CEPCEB hosted its 5th Annual Postdoc Symposium on June 1, 2018. Steve Kay, USC Director of Convergent Bioscience and Provost Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences, presented the keynote address “Grow Up! The Circadian Clock as the Master Regulator of Plant Environmental Responses”. The full day event featured research talks by graduate students...
In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers at the University of California, Riverside report how plants package and deliver the small RNAs, or sRNAs, they use to fight back against plant pathogens. The study focused on Botrytis cinerea, a fungus that causes a grey mold disease in almost all fruits, vegetables, and many...
Congratulations to Martin Luther King Jr. High School graduating senior, Yushan (Susan) Su, for bringing home the Third Life Science Award from Sigma Xi at the Intel ISEF in Pennsylvania. Susan won for her project, “High-Resolution Genetic Profiling of Rice Pinpoints Critical Sugar Transport Genes for Engineering of Flood Resistant Crops”. Susan has had a...
View the youtube Stream of CEPCEB Assistant Professor Carolyn Rasmussen’s lecture “Feeding the World: From Mendel to CRISPR”, where she discusses the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 and its wide range of potential applications and challenges. Presented through the UC Riverside Lecture Series “Gene Editing: Are We Playing God?”
A $1 million gift from longtime campus supporter Rochelle Campbell and Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Campbell Presidential Chair holder Susan Wessler will provide financial support for undergraduate students engaged in summer research – an opportunity out of reach to many students due to financial barriers. You can read the complete article by J.D. Warren...
The University of California, Riverside Department of Botany & Plant Sciences swept multiple Graduate and Undergraduate Award categories at the most recent American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) Western Section Conference on Saturday, February 3, 2018. Pablo Martinez (Carolyn Rasmussen lab) was awarded Best Graduate Student Talk for his work using a single-molecule approach to...
A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside, seeking to upend a long-held theory explaining how hormones freely enter and exit cells, has received a major boost in the form of a $1 million award from the W. M. Keck Foundation. The generous Keck award will allow Sachiko Haga-Yamanaka, Naoki Yamanaka, and Frances...
