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UC Merced Professor Delivers Pellissier Lecture

February 10, 2017
Everyone is invited to hear UC Merced Professor Clarissa Nobile, this year’s Pellissier Distinguished Speaker, discussing biofilms. “Microbial Films: Why are They Important? How do They Form? And What Does This Mean for You?” looks at biofilms, the predominant growth state of most microorganisms on...

New UC Grant Enables Deeper, Broader Valley Fever Research

February 1, 2017
Researchers at UC Merced are playing key roles in the new UC Valley Fever Research Initiative, studying how the Valley fever fungus, Coccidioides immitis, causes disease in its mammalian hosts, and identifying the genes involved in this process. School of Natural Sciences professors Clarissa Nobile...

Genetic Changes Made Native Americans Susceptible to Smallpox, Study Shows

January 18, 2017
A new study identifies genetic changes in Native Americans that came about when Europeans settled in the Pacific Northwest and might have played a major role in why so many natives died of infectious disease. In a new paper in Nature Communications, “A Time Transect of Exomes from a Native American...

Students Building Living Machines Out of Engineered Tissues

January 11, 2017
There are many labs at UC Merced where visitors can see students huddled over microscopes and petri dishes, using tweezers to extract and examine different items. But no one at UC Merced has ever seen the likes of what’s going on in Professor Kara McCloskey’s class. The graduate and undergraduate...

Scientists Build Synthetic Cell-Sized Membranes Out of Paper

January 4, 2017
Scientists have been synthesizing lipid membranes from a variety of materials, making them as lifelike as possible to learn more about how cells work and how they can be manipulated. UC Merced Professor Anand Subramaniam and his students have come up with a novel, portable and startlingly simple...

Study: Warming Could Slow Upslope Migration of Trees

December 15, 2016
By Dan Krotz, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Scientists expect subalpine trees to advance upslope as global temperatures increase, following their climate up the mountains. But new research published Dec. 15 in the journal Global Change Biology suggests this might not hold true for two...

Researchers Enlist Hospital in Fight Against Antibiotic Resistance

December 9, 2016
There are 1.7 million multidrug-resistant, hospital-acquired infections that extend hospital stays, increase medical expenses and decrease quality of life. The United States alone reports at least 120,000 deaths annually from resistant infections that are improperly treated because of a scarcity of...

Picking Over the Past Provides Clues to the Future

November 30, 2016
UC Merced professors Jessica Blois and Justin Yeakel and their graduate students are sifting through time, picking out tiny clues that will give them a mouse’s eye view of the ecosystem that surrounded what is now the La Brea Tar Pits in the middle of Los Angeles.   A deeper look into the past...

People in Eurasia are Genetic Hybrids with Evolutionary Advantages, Study Shows

November 16, 2016
It’s not just luck or practice that gets Sherpa mountaineers up the slopes of Mt. Everest each year. Functioning so well at extreme elevations is in the Sherpa and Tibetan DNA — literally. A new study by UC Merced Professor Emilia Huerta-Sánchez — published recently in the journal Molecular Biology...

The Real Horror of ‘Frankenstein:’ Human Extinction

October 28, 2016
If fictional scientist Victor Frankenstein had created a mate for his nameless Creature, humans would have gone extinct in about 4,000 years, according to a new study co-authored by a UC Merced professor. Two hundred years ago this year, 18-year-old author Mary Shelley began writing her now-classic...

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