Fletcher Lab, in collaboration with the Gladstone Institutes and Doudna Lab, have developed a new CRISPR-based COVID-19 diagnostic test that, with the help of a smartphone camera, can provide a positive or negative result in 15 to 30 minutes. This test also gives an estimate of viral load, or the number of virus particles in a sample, which can help doctors monitor the progression of a COVID-19 infection and estimate how contagious a patient might be.
research
CRISPR-Chip: from the Cover of Nature BME in June 2019 to a product in June 2020
Former BioE postdoc Kiana Aran, now professor at KGI, explains the one-year journey of the CRISPR-Chip from academic publication in June 2019 to a flourishing product in 2020. Berkeley bioengineers, including professors Niren Murthy and Irina Conboy, co-authored the original research.
Can microbes save us from global warming?
Adam Arkin explains the latest research in synthetic and systems biology on the Science is Fun! podcast.
UC Berkeley accelerates bio-preservation research as part of $26M NSF center
Professor Kevin Healy will lead the UC Berkeley efforts in a new multi-university research center funded by the National Science Foundation at the University of Minnesota, Massachusetts General Hospital, UC Berkeley and UC Riverside. The Engineering Research Center for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio) aims to advance methods for storing and preserving biological cells and tissues, work that could benefit biomedical research and dramatically expand organ transplant networks.
How is the coronavirus spreading around the Bay Area?
Professor Liana Lareau is using genome sequencing to study how COVID-19 is spreading around the Bay Area.
Patrick Hsu’s COVID-19 antibody test review featured on 60 Minutes
Early in March, a team of 50 scientists in California did what the FDA had not: they started testing the antibody tests.
Lareau receives LGR Seed Funding award for COVID-19 Project
Prof Liana Lareau and collaborator Stacia Wyman have received one of ten Excellence in Research Awards from the Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR), a collaboration between UC Berkeley/UCSF (IGI) and GlaxoSmithKline. Their project will explore rapid, low-cost, high-throughput viral and metagenome sequencing of COVID-19 patient samples for outbreak surveillance.
Meet the UC Berkeley scientists using decontamination to tackle COVID-19’s PPE shortage
Bioengineering graduate student Gabriela Lomeli interviewed five scientists, including four from Professor Amy Herr’s lab, who have pivoted their research during COVID-19 to write decontamination guidelines for personal protective equipment.
Head-Gordon receives COVID-19 research award
Congratulations Professor Teresa Head-Gordon, who has just been selected for one of the new C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute’s awards for research projects to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Head-Gordon has been funded for her project, “Scoring Drugs: Small Molecule Drug Discovery for COVID-19 Using Physics-Inspired Machine Learning.”