Science Market Update

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has just celebrated the opening of its latest state-of-the-art research labs, at UC Santa Barbara's Center for Stem Cell Biology and Engineering. The new labs are located in the Bio II Building next to the Life Sciences Building on the eastern edge of campus. The 10,000sf, $6.4M wholesale renovation has taken about 5 years to go from concept to full realization. All funding came from CIRM or private donations, to allow faculty the flexibility to study the full range of stem cell technologies, without regard to federal funding limitations. The new Center is part of the Neuroscience Research Institute at UCSB. 

The Bionic Man has not arrived, and to our knowledge the military has not equipped any special agents with cyborg implants to boost their optical capabilities in the field. No, the news is both less and more exciting than those fantasy scenarios: people with end-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) now have the chance to see again. Surgeons and vision scientists at the University of California Davis Eye Center in Sacramento recently celebrated their first successful procedure with the new technology. The medical duo that performed the operation were Drs. Mark Mannis and Jennifer Li.

One of the ways to measure how well a program or department at a university is doing is to look at their graduate programs. To be able to offer the PhD in a specialized area, you need qualified faculty willing and able to take on teaching and mentoring responsibilities; a strong reputation for excellence in the area; research opportunities (and RA funding) for those doctoral students; and equipment and laboratory facilities, to name just a few factors. So when you see an institution win a major grant to launch a PhD program, you know that's a hot area for research and facilities expansion as well.

Watch out corn, you might just have some competition from the tequila plant in the modern day quest for biofuels. The DOE is funding a new $14.3M multi-lab project to study the CAM pathway in drought tolerant plants like agave, a hearty desert succulent. Dr. John Cushman in the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Reno is receiving a new $7.6M grant, with a portion going to the University Liverpool in England as collaborators. The rest of the grant, $6.3M, is being divided between the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Newcastle University, and UT Knoxville. The name of this substantial new grant is: Engineering CAM Photosynthetic Machinery into Bioenergy Crops for Biofuels Production in Marginal Environments. Reno's high desert climate is an ideal center for this innovative biofuel research at a time when rainfall is becoming scarce and new solutions are going to have to be found if we plan to adapt to climate change. 

(Courtesy of Home-HIV-Tests)

It seems we can get oil from any number of unlikely substances these days, and a joint biofuel research team from Texas A&M and Cornell is trying to do just that. With a $2M grant from the NSF, researchers are studying how to extract the naturally-produced oil from algae. So next time you look at a green swimming pool, consider that a similar muck just might be able to fuel your car. Algae is an eukaryotic organism that is photosynthetic and generally aquatic, and it comes in a wide variety of forms. It can be a very small single cell organism like B. braunii or a very large multi-cellular organism like kelp. It fact algae is one of the newest and most promising subjects of research in the quest for biofuels.

In a recent round of new funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), two UC Irvine stem cell research labs and their collaborators at other California universities and private labs have been awarded some $37M, of which approximately $12M will go directly to UCI. The two funded projects involve translational research to develop eventual clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease, in the one study, and retinitis pigmentosa in the other. The new awards bring Irvine's total CIRM funding over the years to $96.25 million, most carried out at the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center (right) which opened its cutting-edge facility on campus 2 years ago.

A research team composed of researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and Yale University recently released a public demonstration of their Map of Life, a database that stores the geographic locations of the world's species. The demonstration version contains about 25,000 different species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish to date, but the goal is to have a complete record for every living organism on Earth. 

Did you know you can be considered a "pot-head" without ever touching, let alone smoking, marijuana? When early neuroscientists went looking for the mental hardware that allowed the body to respond to the active ingredient in the cannabis sativa plant (called THC), they found much more than they were bargaining for. They did in fact identify a perfectly-shaped receptor in the brain. Puzzled at why it would exist (surely the human body was not designed with cannabis-intake in mind?), they went on to discover that the body itself makes a cannabis-like substance, called an endocannabinoid, and that it is part of a complex system regulating appetite, pain, pleasure, and immunity. So, technically, your brain is already wired for pot, and your body produces it all by itself.

Bio researchers in the Gene Expression Laboratory  and Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego have done something remarkable: they've succeeded in turning blood from the umbilical cord (cord blood) into the more specialized cells found in neuronal networks. And they've done it in one transcriptional move using a single protein. Like embryonic stem cells, cord blood stem cells are undifferentiated, meaning they can transform into any cell type. This plasticity has been recognized and studied for several decades now, but typically multiple transcription factors are necessary to create specialized stem cells like those found in the brain.