Publications

The Centers for Disease Control estimate that typhoid fever affects 21.5 million people around the world each year, and the World Health Organization estimates it causes at least 600,000 deaths. Caused by the Salmonella Typhi bacterium, ingested in food or drink contaminated by the urine or feces of infected people, it is uncommon in regions with adequate sanitation and clean water. However, there are also around 7,500 cases in the United States annually. Globally, it remains a major health problem because it is difficult to eradicate.

Harsha Radhakrishnan and Vivek Srinivasan wrote “Simply Shining a Light Can Reveal the Brain’s Structure” about their research on brain imaging for Scientific American’s “MIND Guest Blog”. 

Tiny, soapy bubbles can reorganize their membranes to let material flow in and out in response to the surrounding environment, according to new work carried out in an international collaboration by biomedical engineers at the University of California, Davis, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This behavior could be exploited in creating microbubbles that deliver drugs or other payloads inside the body — and could help us understand how the very first living cells on Earth might have survived billions of years ago.

Graduate students Pasha Hadidi of the Athanasiou Lab and Yu (Charlie) Ouyang of the Cherry Lab co-authors on a recently published Science paper “Total Synthesis of a Functional Designer Eukaryotic Chromosome” describing the world’s first synthetic eukaryotic chromosome.

A hawk circles lazily in the morning sky outside the window of biomedical engineering Professor Marc Facciotti’s office, overlooking a scenic, tree-covered part of the UC Davis campus. It’s cozy and warm with natural sunlight, which seems appropriate because we’re talking about opsins, light sensitive proteins. You are probably most familiar with the opsin – called rhodopsin – that serves as a photoreceptor in your eyes.