Science Market Update

Anyone who's ever pulled an all-nighter to finish a project knows how it wreaks havoc with your metabolism. The fact is, it's not just a nicety to be awake and active during the day and sleep at night: it's the way bodies are hard-wired. Scientists have long-suspected that upsets in a person's biological clock could play a factor in the development of metabolic disorders like diabetes. Now a team of researchers from three Southern California universities has made surprising discoveries that support that hypothesis. Not only have they isolated the protein that regulates the biologic clock (and named it cryptochrome), but they have found a molecule called KL001 that dictates when cryptochrome gets sent to the proteasome recycling bin. Which is to say, they now know a lot more about this complex circadian system that not only tells the body when to sleep and wake, but also how the body should manage glucose levels in those periods of relative activity and dormancy. The bio research study was published in the July 13 advance online issue of the journal Science.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), California's stem cell agency, has just announced a new round of stem cell research funding totalling more than $69M. $12M of that will go to 5 biomedical scientists at the University of California San Diego, with an additional $4.3M awarded to a researcher at Scripps Institute, and a further $4M to two lab teams at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. That brings the total for UCSD and its affiliate La Jolla research institutes to $17.5M for this third round of CIRM's Early Translational Awards program, which supports projects that are in the initial stages of identifying drugs or cell types that could become disease therapies. UCSD alone received almost twice as much stem cell research funding in this round as any other public university, including UCSF.

The UCSD researchers and their labs that won the recent CIRM grants are:

The National Eye Institute (NEI) has just awarded a major grant to a team of three scientists from the Scripps Institute and the University of California San Diego to develop a novel treatment for diabetic retinopathy and other forms of macular degeneration. The optical research investigators are:

On the UCSD Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) campus, an eco-modern 125,000sf science lab building is nearing completion and will have its grand opening in March 2012.  The Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SFSC) building project is also referred to as the La Jolla Laboratory Replacement Project because the previous building became unstable on the rocky coast several years ago during heavy storms and had to be closed down. The $56M new building project is being managed and financed by the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and will be home to 250-300 researchers. In concert with a second $26M science lab building across the street that just broke ground (read below), SIO is strongly positioned to remain one of the world’s elite marine institutions and a major federal research outpost.

"As the institution moves deeper into its second century of discovery, we continue to focus on building our ranks of talented people and supplying the state-of-the-art facilities and labs they need to thrive," writes SIO Vice-Chancellor Tony Haymet. "As we continue to attract the best-of-the-best, including six new assistant professor hires last year and more on the horizon, we remain committed to providing the modern space they need to conduct cutting edge research."

In a demonstration of just how complicated it can be to do life science research, Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD just announced a major project to catalog and make available to study fish that were caught by scientists 40 or 50 years ago.  It's called the Library of Fishes, and thanks to an NSF award it will soon get to the stage where it can open its doors (and jars) to researchers.