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Chemical Biology Lab Creating DNA-based Nanomachines that can Self Assemble

December 21, 2020
Professor Tao Ye and colleagues have received a $1.18 million grant from the Department of Energy to study how DNA molecules can arrange themselves into nanostructures that could form the basis of nanoelectronic circuits. All living things are the products of self-assembly, a process in which...

Researcher Examining CBD Effects on Metabolic Syndrome

November 24, 2020
About 35 percent of Americans have metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that raises the risk of cardiovascular disease — the leading cause of death in the United States. If you have three of these five issues, you have metabolic syndrome, according to the American Heart Association: High...

Connection Between COVID-19 and Loss of Smell Uncovered by Research Team

November 18, 2020
About 70 percent of people with COVID-19 suddenly lose their sense of smell, although fewer of them seem to realize it, according to a new “living analysis” by a research team that includes a UC Merced graduate student. Vicente Ramirez, a Ph.D. student in UC Merced’s Public Health program, and...

Circadian Clock Paper from the LiWang Group is One of the Most Read Articles in Biochemistry

November 10, 2020
Research from the LiWang group published in the journal Biochemistry is one of the Most Read articles. In this study, a newly developed spin-labeled mutant participates in and reports on autonomous macroscopic circadian rhythms as analyzed by continuous-wave electron paramagnetic resonance...

Researchers Seek to Understand Messy Proteins that are Critical to Cellular Function

October 27, 2020
Biophysical chemistry Professor Shahar Sukenik and the graduate students in his lab are trying to make sense out of what might seem to some to be chaos. They aim to better understand how a series of floppy, malleable proteins function — or malfunction — inside cells. The work has earned Sukenik a $...

Hard Shells and Electrosensory Gels: Lab Makes Surprising Discovery

October 19, 2020
Molecular biology Professor Chris Amemiya and his former graduate student Molly Phillips have made a discovery that upends traditional ideas about a structural polysaccharide called chitin that is found in some fish. Over the course of their studies, they collected evidence that chitin — which...

Professor Mike Thompson's Work in Science Expands the Space of Protein Geometries

September 3, 2020
Professor Mike Thompson is a co-author of a paper in Science that expands the space of protein geometries by computational design. Protein design typically selects a protein topology and then identifies the geometries (secondary-structure lengths and orientations) that give the most stable...

New Grant More than Doubles Campus Supercomputing Power

August 31, 2020
UC Merced is rapidly gaining a strong reputation for research and scientific computing across many disciplines and a major expansion of its computing infrastructure is about to cement the campus’ status as a research computing hub. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is supplying $700,000 and the...

The Isborn Group Machine Learns Optical Spectroscopy

August 18, 2020
The Isborn group's work published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters uses machine learning frameworks to dramatically accelerate the simulation of multidimensional optical spectra for solvated biologically important chromophores. Traditionally these simulations have been prohibitively...

New NSF Center Intersects Chemistry and Mechanics

August 3, 2020
Scientists know the whats and whys of using light, heat and electricity to direct chemical reactions toward an end goal. What’s less well understood are the effects mechanical force can have on chemistry. Thanks to a three-year, $1.8 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, a team of...

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