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This technology improves enzymatic activity and biomanufacturing cost by engineering a conserved motif into enzymes and utilizing low-cost non-canonical redox cofactors.

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A novel 3D bioprintable hydrogel platform enables precise spatial delivery of biochemical gradients to engineer in vitro tissue models with area-specific identities.

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AI infrastructure that collects, transcribes, and analyzes student audio responses to deliver actionable insights on learning experiences.

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A breakthrough one-wire EEG cap with embedded electrode chips provides ultra-sensitive, noise-immune, wide-band brain signal acquisition. It enables non-invasive, real-time, high-resolution recording using dry electrodes, ideal for wearable and clinical neuro-technology applications.

UC Berkeley researchers have developed a sophisticated computer-implemented framework that leverages transformer architectures to model the evolution of biological sequences over time. Unlike traditional phylogenetic models that often assume sites evolve independently, this framework utilizes a coupled encoder-decoder transformer to parameterize the conditional probability of a target sequence given multiple unaligned sequences. By capturing complex interactions and dependencies across different sites within a protein or genomic sequence, the model estimates the transition likelihood for each position. This estimation allows for a high-fidelity simulation of evolutionary trajectories. This approach enables a deeper understanding of how proteins change across different timescales and environmental pressures.

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Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have expanded the knowledge on the rippled β-sheet, a protein structural motif formed by certain racemic peptides. Rippled β-sheets already show potential for Alzheimer’s research and drug delivery and leads to formation of hydrogels with enhanced properties. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have further added to the structural foundation of rippled β-sheets, better understanding how rippled β-sheet formation can be controlled at the molecular level.

To address the persistence of "forever chemicals" in global water supplies, UC Berkeley researchers have engineered a sophisticated class of reticular materials designed for the high-affinity capture of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). This technology utilizes Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) that are post-synthetically modified to feature a dual-action defense. By creating a porous framework that mimics the chemical signature of the contaminants themselves, these materials provide a far more efficient and regenerable alternative to traditional activated carbon filters.

Amyloid-β (Aβ) is a protein that is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. Aβ oligomers aggregate to form amyloid plaques, which are found in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. These plaques have high polydispersity; they vary in shape and size. Previously, researchers at UC Santa Cruz demonstrated that using a racemic mixture of Aβ promoted fibril formation, an aggregation that is less neurotoxic than plaques of high polydispersity. Furthermore, these racemic counterparts form rippled β-sheets.

Nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA find many different applications in research. They can act as research reagents, diagnostic agents, therapeutic agents, and more. Nucleic acids are made by enzymes, which are macromolecules that catalyze reactions. Since nucleic acids are so frequently used in research, there is continued interest in finding new and improved ways to synthesize them. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed ways to continuously synthesize nucleic acids without the use of enzymes.

The use of standing surface acoustic waves (SSAWs) in microfluidic channels gained significant momentum when researchers demonstrated size-based cell separation (acoustophoresis) using lateral acoustic forces. Using interdigitated transducers (IDTs) positioned on piezoelectric substrates, SSAWs were found to create pressure nodes along the channel width, allowing larger particles to experience greater acoustic radiation forces and migrate toward these nodes faster than smaller particles. Acoustic-based microfluidic devices were successfully applied to circulating tumor cell (CTC) isolation from clinical blood samples in ~2015, demonstrating recovery rates >80% using tilted-angle standing surface acoustic waves, though these systems relied primarily on size-based separation principles. The integration of acoustic methods with microfluidics offered key advantages including label-free operation, biocompatibility, non-contact manipulation, and preservation of cell viability, addressing limitations of earlier methods like centrifugation, FACS, and magnetic separation that could damage cells or require labeling. Despite these advances in acoustic microfluidics, significant challenges persist in affinity-based rare cell isolation, particularly mass transport limitations in microfluidic channels operating at high Peclet numbers (Pe>10⁶) where convective flow dominates over diffusion. In traditional microfluidic affinity capture systems, cells flow predominantly in the center of laminar flow channels where fluid velocity is highest, resulting in minimal interaction with capture agents immobilized on channel walls and requiring extremely long channels or impractically slow flow rates to achieve adequate capture efficiency. The extremely low concentration of CTCs , combined with their phenotypic heterogeneity and the low diffusion coefficients of cells creates a "needle in a haystack" challenge that existing acoustic separation methods based solely on size discrimination cannot adequately address.

POEM is a groundbreaking 3D bioprinting technology enabling high-resolution, multi-material, and cell-laden structure fabrication with enhanced cell viability.

This technology represents a groundbreaking approach to generating and using biomolecule-loaded extracellular vesicles (EVs) for targeted cellular reprogramming.

This technology offers a revolutionary approach to point-of-care diagnosis and large-scale health surveillance by enabling portable, high-accuracy detection of proteins, bioparticles, and cells.

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

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Accurate automatic pronunciation assessment, particularly the core subtask of phonetic error detection, is significantly hampered by speech variability stemming from accents and dysfluencies, which current models fail to capture effectively. This innovation, developed by UC Berkeley researchers, addresses this by disclosing a verbatim phoneme recognition framework specifically designed to transcribe what speakers actually say rather than what they are supposed to say . The framework uses multi-task training combined with novel phoneme similarity modeling. The present disclosure also includes the development and open-sourcing of VCTK-accent, a simulated dataset containing phonetic errors, and proposes two novel metrics for assessing pronunciation differences. This work establishes a new, more accurate benchmark for phonetic error detection, enabling more precise and effective articulatory feedback for pronunciation training.

An innovative technique for creating high-sensitivity Whispering Gallery Mode (WGM) sensors through advanced microbubble resonator fabrication.