UC Davis Biotechnology Program

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/06/health/lab-grown-meat-pros-cons-life-itself-wellness-scn/index.html

How 'lab-grown' meat could help the planet and our health | CNN Cultivated meat is made from animals cells, not livestock. Here's how it's made, where the US stands on approval and how it could affect human and environmental health.

UC Davis academic programs that provide training for bioindustrial manufacturing career paths are featured in STEMconnector's new ebook. This ebook explores the people and companies driving innovations with the potential to feed, fuel and build a more sustainable eco-friendly world. Advancements in biotechnology and bioindustrial manufacturing are driving improvements in manufacturing efficiency and reducing the use and reliance of petrochemicals for producing fuel and consumer products.

The bioeconomy is poised for enormous growth over the coming decades, driving increased demand for a diverse STEM-skilled workforce. Career opportunities abound in bioindustrial manufacturing to create new products that will reduce our carbon footprint, expand U.S. manufacturing, and accelerate our economy.

Bioindustrial Manufacturing - Made in the USA - STEMconnector STEMconnections ebook Series - Funded by BioMADE

Biotech Program Summer Course: Network Mapping 101 - August 30-31, 2022

Join us for a virtual course and learn how to integrate statistical, functional, multivariate and machine learning results within a publication quality network!

Topics
• Multivariate exploratory analysis and visualization - identify or review your data analysis plan
• Create, validate & visualize classification & regression machine learning predictive models
• Calculate biochemical, structural similarity and empirical networks
• Use network mapping to integrate data analysis results and create a publication quality network visualization

Prerequisites
This course is open to anyone (academic and industry) and will be targeted at beginner and intermediate practitioners of applied data analysis. A combination of lectures and demonstrations will be used to prepare students for hands-on labs allowing self-guided exploration of covered topics. Hands-on labs will employ user interface, API and code-based tools. This course will be taught virtually (Zoom).

Instructions will be provided to registered course participants on how to access all online content and tools, including R programming language 3.6.2 or higher, R Studio Desktop and Cytoscape. A special session will be hosted before the workshop to help answer any questions about installation of the required tools.

Instructor Bio
Dr. Dmitry Grapov (Founder, Creative Data Solutions) has over ten years of industry experience in a variety of biotech settings, including agricultural/plant biotech, healthcare and synthetic biology. His expertise broadly encompasses bioinformatics, data science and machine learning with specific research interests in ‘omics data integration, multivariate data analysis and visualization, network analysis and machine learning. Dr. Grapov received a BS in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Utah and a PhD in Agricultural and Environmental Chemistry with a Designated Emphasis in Biotechnology (DEB) from UC Davis. In addition to running CDS and teaching courses, he serves as the Senior Director, Data Science at Amyris.

Registration and course fee information can be found here: https://ces-apps.ucdavis.edu/confreg/?confid=1200

Conference and Event Services | UC Davis This intensive Zoom course will be taught by Dr. Dmitry Grapov (Creative Data Solutions) on August 30-31, 2022. The course will include instruction on:

https://www.biospace.com/article/industry-vs-academia-which-is-the-better-place-to-work-as-a-life-scientist-/?s=64&utm_campaign=Newsletter%20%7C%20CareerInsider&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=210043453&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9WbpVZ2OjnlzQTG8yG6l5snvy2Waw5boiBLwrhpuzyHnlN3PCmPUsAn3gT3-yU6Se1udL6ZdB_OWCxfjkEwiVFe_sxNw&utm_content=210043453&utm_source=hs_email

Industry vs. Academia: Which is the Better Place to Work as a Life Scientist? | BioSpace Discover the differences in working in academia or the Life Science industry, the pros and cons of both sectors and tips for breaking into these fields in our comprehensive guide.

The UC Davis Biotechnology Program held the 31st Annual Biotechnology Program Retreat last Saturday, April 9th. We were pleased to hold the event in-person at the Genome Center auditorium and lobby. Participants spent two morning sessions listening to DEB students present STEM-Talks on the latest research happening in their laboratories. After a poster session break and lunch, we spent the afternoon session hearing from DEB alums and industry partners on their companies and professional journeys.

Special thank you to Dr. Judy Kjelstrom, Director Emerita of the Biotechnology Program, for donating the prize money for the 1st place STEM-Talk winner. Encouraging students to develop their science communication skills is something Dr. Judy is very passionate about.

The winners of the DEB STEM-Talk competition and poster winners are listed below:

The “Dr. Judy” Kjelstrom Outstanding DEB Student Science Communication Award for Best Stem-Talk:
Laney Casella - “Development of an Electrically and Mechanically Tunable Hydrogel Platform for Tissue Engineering”

Runner-up STEM-Talk:
Erin Markle - “Generation and Functional Analysis of Second-Generation Recombinant Enhanced Antiviral Restrictors (REAVRs)”

Audience Favorite STEM-Talk:
Nitin Beesabathuni - “An Image is Worth a Thousand Features: Image-Based Single-Cell Profiling of Autophagy-Related Phenotypes”

Best Biotech Poster:
Yofi Wyle - “Developing Ex vivo Chip-based Neural Tube Organoids for Functional Screening of Stem Cells for in Utero Treatment of Myelomeningocele”

Runner-up Biotech Poster:
Katie Haddad - “Rapid Bioproduction of Protein Biologics in Plants for Low Resource Settings”

Thank you to our industry partners who gave interesting and informative talks. It was great to have our alums come back to present to the next generation of DEB students!

The industry presenters were:
Brad Niles, PhD (DEB Alum): CEO, Ariz Precision Medicine
Kevin Holden, PhD (DEB Alum): Head of Science, Synthego Corp.
Yulong Liu, PhD (DEB Alum): R&D Scientist, Upside Foods
Stephen Young, PhD (UCD Alum): Business Manager, Scientific Projects, Turtle Tree

• What to Expect from a Successful Medical Device Product Development Experience

Nov 9 (Global Entrepreneurship Week!), 10:30-11:45a

Efficient and effective product development is a crucial step that sits between defining a minimum viable product and manufacturing, en route to being able to sell a desirable product to eager customers. This talk, led by experienced engineers from Triple Ring Technologies, will serve as an introduction to product development for entrepreneurs and innovators. For example, medical devices typically have high product complexity, tight budgets, and must ultimately operate in a regulated environment—and best practices can be adapted for many other hardware products on the journey to scaled-up manufacture.
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZhjP-IsHQrqv32YLpBYHzQ

Innovative Women Changing the Global Future of Food!

These Leaders in Food Innovation & Entrepreneurship are forging new ways to approach meat, dairy and seafood! Join us for this exciting virtual panel on September 15th at 6-7:30 pm PT hosted by our UC Davis Biotechnology Program & Cultivated Meat Research Consortium. Our cultivated meat research students will ask their own questions of these amazing women to learn how they are pioneering a new food system!

To register: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqc-urqjgrE9avdsVWNlz9FWHkwsABftM9

Looking forward to Sandhya Sriram, PhD, Patricia Bubner, PhD, Fengru Lin and Jess Krieger speak about their vision and their companies (Shiok Meats, Orbillion Bio (YC W21), TurtleTree, Ohayo Valley)! Hosted by Biotechnology Program Director Denneal Jamison-McClung with students Minami Ogawa, Xingyu Chen and Grace Alethea Kwong assisting with questions. Sponsored by Merck KGaA and UPSIDE Foods as a mid-week event to our UCD Short Course Seminar Series in Cultivated Meat https://ces-apps.ucdavis.edu/confreg/index.cfm?confid=1166&webid=5663, the first comprehensive academic week long training course!

(University of California, Davis Cultivated Meat researchers: Professors David Block, Keith Baar, Karen McDonald, Somen Nandi, Kent Leach, Lucas Smith, Payam Vahmani, Ameer Taha, Ned Spang, Jiandi Wan, Anita Oberholster, Daniel Sumner, Students Nick Johnson, Negulescu, Derrick, Tom Jara, Carolina F., Justin Wong, Lin-Ya Hu, Ted O'Neill, Zachary Cosenza, YAOJUN GUO)

UC Davis Give Day 2021 starts tomorrow at noon! Help support training the future leaders of emerging technologies impacting human health, environmental sustainability and agriculture! Every gift counts!!!https://giveday.ucdavis.edu/giving-day/34890/department/38823

UC Davis Give Day 2021 Greater Together

The Biotechnology Program will be joining this year’s UC Davis Give Day! An action packed 29-hour online and on-the-ground fundraiser across UC Davis to drive support for our students, faculty, and university programs. We hope you can join us! https://giveday.ucdavis.edu/giving-day/34890/department/38823

UC Davis Give Day 2021 Greater Together

https://nyti.ms/3aglpiL

A California University Tries to Shield an Entire City From Coronavirus The University of California, Davis, is providing free testing, masks and quarantine housing to tens of thousands of people who live nearby.

UC Davis joins new $274.5M bioindustrial manufacturing center UC Davis will play an important role in a new $274.5 million multi-institution center to develop reliable, sustainable and large-scale bioindustrial manufacturing and technology. The Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE) was awarded $87.5 million over 7 years by the Department o...

Cultured meat is coming and it's good for the planet But it has much larger hurdles than today's plant-based burgers and sausages.

Congratulations to DEB student Darwin Bandoy, who has been selected by the USDA as a Food Safety Fellow through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) program . Darwin will investigate whether virulence genes and specific allelic versions drive the pathogenicity of extraintestinal Salmonella Dublin. Understanding virulence factors is important to FSIS because it may help focus our resources on those pathogens of greatest concern.

Constituent Update - October 2, 2020 FSIS to Participate in NARMS Public Meeting; More

The Biotechnology Program is home of the Cultivated Meat Consortium - we're looking forward to working with DEB faculty and students on the new award and related projects!

UC Davis Establishes Research, Training in Cultivated Meat Is cultivated meat — essentially, animal protein grown under lab conditions — a nourishing prospect to help feed the world, or is it more sizzle than steak? A consortium of researchers at the University of California, Davis, aims to explore the long-term sustainability of cultivated meat, suppor...

The Biotechnology Program's latest blog post, written by DEB Student Marwa Zafarullah:

How Can We Cut and Repair Defective Genes? How Can We Cut and Repair the Defective Genes? by Marwa Zafarullah Advanced genome editing tools improve our ability to cut and repair the defective genes responsible for various diseases in human beings, along with the generation of animal models and agricultural applications. Now the questions are...

Check out the Biotechnology Program's latest blog post written by DEB student, Alan Nguyen - "Why is Doing Good Science Difficult?"

Why is Doing Good Science Difficult? Why is Doing Good Science Difficult? by Alan Nguyen It has been a while since the last time I wrote something for the Endoplasmic Biotech-You-Learn blog. Since the last blog, I have been quite busy with doing experiments, analyzing data, and trying to tie up the last loose ends for my pending manusc...

Grab the popcorn! Special screening of PICTURE A SCIENTIST docu-film by Picture a Sci film. Register for the Genome Engineering Conference: bit.ly/2BlOTh9

Discovering Curiosity: The Tangled Fate of Math and Biology with Professor Mariel Vazquez Quick Summary From pocketed headphones to carelessly packed garden hoses, knots find ways to manifest Our DNA molecules can get tied into knots too Professor Mariel Vazquez applies her training in mathematics to fundamental questions about DNA structure and functionality Professor Mariel Vazquez fis...

The UC Davis Biotechnology Program has just published the 2020 Biotech Times magazine. I hope you'll take a few moments to view some of the activities and events that we were involved in over the last year.

Special thanks to our longtime colleague and magazine editor, Marianne Hunter. As many of you know, Marianne retired from the Biotechnology Program at the end of June. Please see page 4 of the magazine to read more about the many ways Marianne affected the program over the years. Marianne was also the administrator of this page and kept our community informed and engaged with her frequent posts. We will miss her and wish her all the best!

2020 Biotech Times 2020 Biotech Times

Great article about DEB student Marwa Zafarullah's research.

As a child in Pakistan, Marwa Zafarullah heard the same thing from family friends and neighbors: she looked much more like her mother than her father.

“You’re just like her clone,” they’d say.

And the comments got Marwa thinking, “Why?”

Why did she look more like her mother than her father? And why did her siblings look more like her dad? Such questions of heredity filled Zafarullah’s mind, and at that moment, her curiosity about genetics was born.

Today, at the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences, Zafarullah, a Ph.D. student in the Integrative Genetics and Genomics Graduate Group, investigates the pathology of a rare neurodegenerative disease called Fragile X- Associated Tremor/Ataxia Syndrome (FXTAS). Predominantly affecting men, this debilitating disorder typically manifests after the age of 50. Its progression can be rapid, with symptoms including a substantial decline in movement and cognition. Currently, there are no cures or treatments available for FXTAS.

Zafarullah hopes to change that. As part of her Ph.D. dissertation research, she’s developing a biomarker for the early diagnosis and progression of the disease. For her research, Zafarullah recently won the Emmy Werner and Stanley Jacobsen Fellowship from UC Davis, which is awarded to a graduate student studying genetic aspects of human behavior, health and development :https://biology.ucdavis.edu/news/questions-heredity-integrative-genetics-and-genomics-phd-student-marwa-zafarullah-wins-emmy

Great message from Anne Wojcicki, CEO and Co-founder, 23andMe:
https://www.23andme.com/blackout-tuesday

Blackout Tuesday - 23andMe We are observing Blackout Tuesday, a day of action against racial injustice, and will be dark across our global websites for 24 hours.

Dr. Debika Mitra is a DEB alum and we couldn’t be more proud of her accomplishments, professionalism and ability to teach and inspire others!

Black light experiment shows how quickly a virus like Covid-19 can spread at a restaurant

Online Graduation Celebrations to Include Personal Touches The pandemic's need for social distancing that moved UC Davis graduations online won't prevent personal touches.

The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them Please read this link to learn about the author and background to these posts. It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from t...

Did you know that UC Davis owns a biodigester that creates clean energy to power the campus?

The Renewable Energy Anaerobic Digester (READ) is a sustainable biodigester designed to convert up to 50 tons of organic waste a day into clean energy used to heat the UC Davis Primate Center. The efficient digester technology was perfected over decade-long research by Professor Ruihong Zhang, a faculty member in the biological and agricultural engineering department at UC Davis. Roughly 13,500 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year are expected to be offset from this production and up to 20,000 tons of waste is diverted.

Celebrating UC Davis’ Remarkable Women A congresswoman, an astronaut, academic groundbreakers, the university’s first female chancellor and more: UC Davis is highlighting 55 of its most significant women in history as part of a celebration marking the 150th anniversary of the admission of women to the University of California.

COVID-19 ‘LIVE’ Series Debuts May 7 UC Davis is launching two new series that take a deep dive into how our researchers are meeting the challenge of COVID-19. They will explore how UC Davis scientists, clinicians, engineers and others, often working across disciplines, are turning their knowledge to tackle COVID-19, from its origin to...