Finding Archaea: Archaeans inhabit some of the most extreme environments on Earth. Woese and Fox’s genetic analysis led them to redraw the Tree of Life, incorporating this third domain. (Photo: Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park; Jim Peaco; March 2015; Catalog #20008d.)
Sarah C.P. Williams | Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows Program
Ke Xu, Associate Professor of Chemistry, is a 2021 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellow. (Photo by Elena Zhukova)
What do the smallest building blocks of life look like? How do molecules dance and dart and drift through cells, fold and fuse and form the machinery of living things? For...
UC Berkeley business and chemistry alumni Geo Guillen, left, and Marco Lobba, middle, launched Catena Biosciences with Berkeley chemistry professor Matthew Francis. The trio credit Berkeley’s entrepreneurship ecosystem for their company’s rapid rise. (Photo courtesy of Catena Biosciences)
Marco Lobba was five years into his UC Berkeley chemistry Ph.D. program...
Ribosomes (blue, upper left) are nanomachines that read mRNA (coming in from left) to assemble a chain of amino acids (magenta balls) that folds into a compact 3D protein (lower right, pink). (Graphic adapted from the National Science Foundation (NSF) image)
Synthetic biologists have become increasingly creative in engineering yeast or bacteria to churn out...
The catalysis innovator on the thrills of heading to the mountains and having a reaction named after him.
John Hartwig is the Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the 2019 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. His research aims to find new metal-catalysed reactions, and he was one of the developers of the Buchwald-...
Matthew Francis, Chair of the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, announces the addition of two new faculty members who will join the College in July. Alanna Schepartz joins the faculty as the T. Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Chair in Chemistry; Michael Zuerch joins the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry.
Fall semester at UC Berkeley brings cool air, sunny skies and hordes of nervous incoming first-year undergrads to the campus. At the College of Chemistry, the beginning of the semester also triggers a sudden epidemic of goofy handmade posters that seem to multiply and cover every available vertical surface.
Cheri Ackerman (Ph.D. '17, ChemBio) is a co-founder & CEO @ Concerto Biosciences, an MIT/Harvard spinout that develops microbial “ensembles” as revolutionary new disease treatments. To discover ensembles, Concerto uses a novel screening...
Blast disease destroys between 10% and 35% of the world’s rice harvest each year. A new discovery could lead to fungicides that block the pathogen, Magnaporthe oryzae, from entering the leaves. This photo of a healthy rice field was taken in Chengdu, China, in 2019. (Photo credit: Nicholas Talbot)
A fungus that plagues rice crops worldwide gains entry to plant cells in a way that leaves...
