During his 20-year tenure as founding director of the UC Davis Genome Center, Richard Michelmore, recruited more than 20 faculty members, led the center to prominence as a hub of technology-driven biology and made national headlines by implementing an innovative, community-scale, saliva-based COVID test. Quite the legacy for someone who never wanted the job in the first place.
Blake Meyers, a professor of plant sciences from the University of Missouri - Columbia and a principal investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, has been named the new director and Novozymes Chair in Genomics at the UC Davis Genome Center. Meyers, who studies plant RNA biology, bioinformatics and functional genomics, will step into the role on March 1, 2024.
Mitchell Feldmann has been hired as an assistant professor in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences and continues with the internationally prestigious UC Davis Strawberry Breeding Program. His assistant professor position began this month.
Scientists Grey Monroe and Daniela Quiroz are trying to develop a technique that could speed research on processes affecting countless facets of biology – from how plants respond to stressful conditions to the changes that trigger cells’ cancerous growth. They just won a $50,000 boost for their work, with a grant from the UC Davis Science Translation and Innovative Research (STAIR™) program.
Sorghum is an earthy, nutty, gluten-free grain that boasts remarkable drought tolerance. It also poses serious potential as a sustainable crop in a warming world.
Plant scientists and wheat breeders now have a new tool to develop more nutritious and productive wheat varieties: A public online database of 10 million mutations in wheat genes. Scientists at UC Davis and three institutions in the UK created the database, which will allow scientists worldwide to study the function of every gene of wheat.
Is adaptation to cold environments regulated by a few genes, thousands of genes, or a specific set (or different sets) of genes each time? Ross-Ibarra and colleagues are trying to answer these questions.
