A novel RT assay for detecting chemical adducts on RNA, utilizing fluorescence quenching to indicate the presence of modifications.

Innovative cell lines enabling precise genetic modifications to advance research in gene function, disease modeling, and potential therapeutic interventions.

A revolutionary approach to mapping and analyzing DNA, RNA, and proteins within cells and tissues for advanced biological research and clinical diagnostics.

A novel motorized tool designed to precisely deliver retinal tissue during transplantation, enhancing outcomes for patients with retinal degeneration.

An advanced geometric method for comprehensive 3D cardiac strain analysis, enhancing diagnosis and monitoring of myocardial diseases.

A novel device leveraging centrifugal microfluidics to accelerate bacterial growth and rapidly determine antibiotic susceptibility.

This technology offers a sophisticated approach to detecting coronavirus infections, including COVID-19, and assessing immunity through advanced biochip systems

This technology enables precise, selective manipulation of magnetically barcoded materials, distinguishing them from background magnetic materials

Advances in biological research have been greatly influenced by the development of organoids, a specialized form of 3D cell culture. Created from pluripotent stem cells, organoids are effective in vitro models in replicating the structure and progression of organ development, providing an exceptional tool for studying the complexities of biology. Among these, cerebral cortex organoids (hereafter "organoid") have become particularly instrumental in providing valuable insights into brain formation, function, and pathology. Despite their potential, organoid experiments present several challenges. Organoids require a rigorous, months-long developmental process, demanding substantial resources and meticulous care to yield valuable data on aspects of biology such as neural unit electrophysiology, cytoarchitecture, and transcriptional regulation. Traditionally the data has been difficult to collect on a more frequent and consistent basis, which limits the breadth and depth of modern organoid biology. Generating and measuring organoids depend on media manipulations, imaging, and electrophysiological measurements. Historically are labor- and skill-intensive processes which can increase risks associated with experimental validity, reliability, efficiency, and scalability.

A cornerstone of bacterial molecular biology is the ability to genetically manipulate the microbe under study. Manipulating the genomes of bacteria is critical to many fields. Such manipulations are made by genetic engineering, which often requires new pieces of DNA to be added to the genome. It is often difficult to move genes into a recalcitrant destination organism due to surveillance systems (CRISPR, Restriction Modification) of the destination/host which degrade invading DNA . It may be commercially desirable to evade these systems in the destination organism. However, evading these systems may require significant experimental effort to design and implement.

A novel method for selectively targeting and modulating brain border-associated myeloid cells for the treatment of neurological disorders.

An engineered polymerase enabling the synthesis of threose nucleic acid (TNA) for advanced therapeutic applications.

An innovative mid-throughput technique for screening and optimizing threose nucleic acid (TNA) aptamers for protein-binding activity.

Advances in biological research have been greatly influenced by the development of organoids, a specialized form of 3D cell culture. Created from pluripotent stem cells, organoids are effective in vitro models in replicating the structure and progression of brain development, providing an exceptional tool for studying the complexities of biology. Among these, cortical organoids, comprising in part of neurons, have been instrumental in providing early insights into brain formation, function, and pathology. Functional characteristics of cortical organoids, such as cellular morphology and electrophysiology, provide physiological insight into cellular states and are crucial for understanding the roles of cell types within their specific niches. And while progress has been made studying engineered neuronal systems, decoding the functional properties of neuronal networks and their role in producing behaviors depends in part on recognizing neuronal cell types, their general locations within the brain, and how they connect.

X-radiation (X-ray) imaging is one of the most common imaging techniques in medicine. Presently, thin-film transistor flat panel detectors are the gold standard for X-ray detection; however, these detectors average across the absorbed X-ray spectrum and thus suffer from poor material decomposition and lesion differentiation. Modern efforts to address this focus on three methods of energy differentiation: dual-shot, photon counting, and dual-layer detectors. Dual-shot detection utilizes a single detector to image a patient with two shots of X-rays at low and high energies. While this has been shown to effectively differentiate between soft and hard tissues, (e.g., chest radiography) this results in a higher dose level to the patient and motion artifacts from slight movement between images. Photon counting detectors offer an alternative to multiple shots, providing high spatial resolution, low dose, and multiple energy binning with photon weighting. However, these detectors also require more complex circuit design for fast readout, have limited material options with great enough yield and detective quantum efficiency at low to mid energy ranges, and are limited in detective area. Dual-layer detectors that stack two detector layers to each process low and high energy X-rays remove motion artifacts by utilizing a single shot of polyenergetic X-rays. These most commonly employ two indirect detectors separated by a Cu filtering layer, which photon-starves the second higher energy detector. Unfortunately, this also requires a higher X-ray intensity, resulting in a higher dose level to the patient.

Advances in biological research have been greatly influenced by the development of organoids, a specialized form of 3D cell culture. Created from pluripotent stem cells, organoids are effective in vitro models in replicating the structure and progression of organ development, providing an exceptional tool for studying the complexities of biology. Among these, cerebral cortex organoids (hereafter "organoid") have become particularly instrumental in providing valuable insights into brain formation, function, and pathology. Modern methods of interfacing with organoids involve any combination of encoding information, decoding information, or perturbing the underlying dynamics through various timescales of plasticity. Our knowledge of biological learning rules has not yet translated to reliable methods for consistently training neural tissue in goal-directed ways. In vivo training methods commonly exploit principles of reinforcement learning and Hebbian learning to modify biological networks. However, in vitro training has not seen comparable success, and often cannot utilize the underlying, multi-regional circuits enabling dopaminergic learning. Successfully harnessing in vitro learning methods and systems could uniquely reveal fundamental mesoscale processing and learning principles. This may have profound implications, from developing targeted stimulation protocols for therapeutic interventions to creating energy-efficient bio-electronic systems.

The targeted intracellular delivery of protein cargos is critical for therapeutic applications such as enzyme inhibition, transcriptional modulation, and genome editing. For most tissues, the delivery of these molecules must occur in-vivo. This has historically been achieved using viral vectors or lipid nanoparticles. While significant progress has been made in engineering the tropisms of these particles towards different tissues, delivery specificity and packaging limits remain challenging. UC Berkeley researchers have developed engineered immune cells that produce and intercellularly transfer a protein and/or RNA cargo in response to contact with a predetermined antigen. Proof of concept experiments demonstrated that production of EDVs can be induced in a T cell line through either the presence of a small molecule or recognition by the T cells of a specific antigen on co-cultured cells. The researchers showed that delivery can be achieved using multiple strategies and that the system is compatible with multiple cargo proteins of interest, including Cre recombinase and S.pyogenes Cas9. 

Advances in biological research have been greatly influenced by the development of organoids, a specialized form of 3D cell culture. Created from pluripotent stem cells, organoids are effective in vitro models in replicating the structure and progression of organ development, providing an exceptional tool for studying the complexities of biology. Among these, cerebral cortex organoids (hereafter “organoid”) have become particularly instrumental in providing valuable insights into brain formation, function, and pathology. Despite their potential, organoid experiments present several challenges. Organoids require a rigorous, months-long developmental process, demanding substantial resources and meticulous care to yield valuable data on aspects of biology such as neural unit electrophysiology, cytoarchitecture, and transcriptional regulation. Traditionally the data has been difficult to collect on a more frequent and consistent basis, which limits the breadth and depth of modern organoid biology. Generating and measuring organoids depend on media manipulations, imaging, and electrophysiological measurements. Historically these are labor- and skill-intensive processes which can increase risks associated with known human error and contamination.

In PET imaging, patient motion, such as respiratory and cardiac motion, are a major source of blurring and motion artifacts. Researchers at the University of California, Davis have developed a technology designed to enhance PET imaging resolution without the need for external devices by effectively mitigating these artifacts

A groundbreaking method for the efficient isolation and preservation of high-purity small extracellular vesicles (sEVs - exosomes) from biofluids using a novel EXO-PEG-TR reagent.

BMSO represents a groundbreaking advancement in crosslinking mass spectrometry (XL-MS), enabling comprehensive mapping of protein-protein interactions.

IS110 family transposons encode a protein component (also referred to as the transposase) and a non coding RNA component (also referred to as the bridgeRNA or bRNA). In its naturally occurring context, a bRNA-bound transposase directs the integration of its cognate transposon (also referred to as the donor) into target DNA sites. The nucleic acid sequence and structure of the bRNA partially determines the sequence identify of the terminal ends of the mobilized donor, and the sequence identify of the target DNA molecule (also referred to as the target or target DNA). UC Berkeley researchers have developed a programmable gene editing technology based on IS110 family transposons that can be used for targeted insertions, deletions, excisions, inversions, replacements, and capture of DNA in vitro and in vivo. Additionally, this technology can be multiplexed to achieve complex assembles of multiple fragments of DNA.

A breakthrough imaging technique that provides high-resolution visualization of optically transparent materials at a low cost.

A novel suite of trioxane-based, MS-cleavable cross-linking reagents enhancing protein-protein interaction studies.

An AI-powered platform for the generation of automated electronic patient anatomy education models, providing surgeons with clinically relevant patient anatomy data.