UC Berkeley Department of Bioengineering

A team of researchers led by Professor Patrick Hsu has discovered the first DNA recombinase that is programmable, allowing the user to specify any desired genomic target sequence and any donor DNA molecule to be inserted. The bridge recombinase mechanism promises to expand genome editing beyond CRISPR and RNA interference (RNAi) to offer a unified mechanism for programmable DNA rearrangements. Bioengineering graduate student Nicholas Perry is also a lead author of the study, along with other researchers from the Arc Institute.

Pulse 2.0 interviewed MTM alumnus Sungwon Lim, founder of ImpriMed, a company that provides personalized medicine for pets with blood cancer diseases.

Berkeley researchers led by Professor Michael Yartsev, working with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, have identified the part of the brain in Egyptian fruit bats that controls vocalizations and found that it contains similar neural wiring and genetics to the part of the human brain that controls speech.