Chemical Biology

UC Berkeley and Gladstone scientists develop new Covid-19 test

December 7, 2020
by Kara Manke | UC Berkeley Public Relations

image for lighting up covid test

In the diagnostic test, a patient sample is mixed with CRISPR Cas13 proteins (purple) and molecular probes (green) which fluoresce, or light up, when cut. When coronavirus RNA is present in the sample, it prompts the CRISPR proteins to snip the molecular probes, causing the whole sample to emit light. This fluorescence can be detected with a cell phone camera. (Image courtesy...

During campus visit, U.S. representatives vow to fight freeze on federal research funding

February 24, 2025
By Robert Sanders | UC Berkeley media relations
East Bay Rep. Lateefah Simon and Los Angeles Rep. Ted Lieu visited the Innovative Genomics Institute for a tour and briefing.

From lab rotations to legacy: 20 years of growth in the Chemical Biology Graduate Program

January 1, 2025
By Veronica Bartell | College of Chemistry

The Berkeley Chemical Biology Graduate Program began as a way to support students as they rotated through different labs. Now, 20 years in, the program has grown far beyond a series of lab rotations. The 15 to 20 students who join the program each year – coming from both the Division of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology – can expect in-depth mentoring, coursework, speaker series and symposia that prepare them for a range of jobs. The program has proudly served as a blueprint for many other institutions building their own chemical biology programs. While grant...

Research shines a light on development of the visual cortex during the critical period after birth

January 19, 2022
UC Berkeley, College of Chemistry Press Release
A new study from the labs of Professors S. Lawrence Zipursky (UCLA) and Karthik Shekhar (UC Berkeley) presents "significant findings that shine an exciting light on our understanding of the influence of vision during the critical period of development in the mouse visual cortex.”

John Hartwig: The 2019 Wolf Prize and the importance of fundamental research in the discovery of synthetic catalysts

March 9, 2019
Marge d'Wylde | College of Chemistry

John Hartwig (Ph.D.’90, Chem), is the Henry Rapoport Professor in Organic Chemistry at UC Berkeley. He joined the senior faculty at the College of Chemistry in 2011. His research group is focused on the discovery and understanding of new reactions of organic compounds catalyzed by transition metal complexes and artificial metalloenzymes. Among the many potential applications are catalysts for pharmaceuticals, renewable chemicals, and fuels.

Hartwig did his graduate research at UC Berkeley with advisors Robert Bergman...

Chemistry Nobelist Carolyn Bertozzi’s years at UC Berkeley

October 5, 2022
By Robert Sanders | UC Berkeley media relations

Professor Bertozzi standing at whiteboard.

Carolyn Bertozzi as a young professor at UC Berkeley. (Photo: courtesy of College of Chemistry)

Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor at Stanford University who today shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, spent her formative and most creative years at UC Berkeley.

After graduating from Harvard University in 1988, she earned her Ph.D. in chemistry...

Rethinking the Tree of Life with new tools

January 17, 2022
JaeJin Choi and Byung-Ju Kim| Research Outreach

Morning Glory Pool, Yellowstone National Park

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.)

Professor Sung-Hou Kim and his colleagues...

Seeing in super-resolution

January 20, 2023
Sarah C.P. Williams | Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows Program

Portrait of Ke Xu in the lab. (Photo by Elena Zhukova)

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...

Berkeley startup aims to be a game changer in autoimmune disease therapy

July 22, 2021
By Ivan Natividad| UC Berkeley Public Relations

Geo Guillen, Marco Lobba, Matthew Francis
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...

Retooling the translation machine could expand the chemical repertoire of cells

June 16, 2023
By Robert Sanders | UC Berkeley media relations

How proteins are made

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...