A Message from the Dean: 2020, the year of molecular vision

Did you know that seven of the 17 Research Core Facilities on the UC Davis campus reside here in the College of Biological Sciences?

The Biological Electron Microscope Core Facility has just added an unprecedented instrument of power to our UC Davis scientific toolbelt, an addition to that will help us bring focus and clarity to the life sciences like never before:

Cryo-EM is a revolutionary and disruptive technology that biologists have dreamt about for years. Our researchers can now glimpse molecules at atomic resolutions, gaining insight into how life functions and unlocking the origins of disease.

Cryo-EM is an essential technology to have on the Davis campus. The top journals are publishing new work—weekly—based on it. We know this tech will be a huge boon to people’s research programs here.

We’re already generating new data using this instrument and can’t wait to bring other UC Davis researchers into the atomic structural fold.

Through science, we will all see a little more clearly this year. Here’s to 2020 vision!

Go Ags,

Atomic-level imaging has finally arrived at UC Davis! Introducing the newest addition to the Biological Electron Microscope Core Facility. The College of Biological Sciences is home to seven of 17 Core Facilities on the Davis campus and we are thrilled to add this disruptive and catalyzing world-class tech to the UC Davis research arsenal.

Natalie Sahabandu wasn’t sure how to properly hold a pipette when she joined Assistant Professor Katherine Ralston’s lab as an undergraduate researcher in June 2016. But all fledgling scientists start their research journeys somewhere.

“Being a minority and being a first-generation college student, it was super important to me to have a support system,” said Sahabandu, who enrolled in the Biology Undergraduate Scholars Program (BUSP) when she transferred to UC Davis in 2016. “I needed the best.”

Today, Sahabandu is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (BMCDB) Graduate Group.

To attract a mate, male orchid bees collect scents from the environment to create the perfect aroma. Research suggests that these perfumes are unique to each orchid bee species. In a Nature Communications study , UC Davis researchers link the evolution of sexual signaling in orchid bees to a gene that’s been shaped by each species’ perfume preferences.

“Imagine you have an ancestral species that uses certain compounds to communicate with each other. If you have a chemical communication channel and then that chemical communication channel splits into two separate channels, then you have the opportunity for the formation of two separate species.”

- Associate Professor Santiago Ramirez, Department of Evolution and Ecology.