Research

In the La Brea Tar Pits, few of the recovered Saber Tooth Tiger skulls still have the sabers attached. But in the batch that had the sabers, a handful exhibited a peculiar feature: the tooth socket for the saber was occupied by two teeth, with the permanent tooth slotted into a groove in the baby tooth. Paleontologist Jack Tseng, Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, doesn’t think the double fangs were a fluke. Read more in this Berkeley news article linked here.
 

Watch the video of Professor Emeritus Jim Patton interview Professor of the Graduate School Marvalee Wake about her current and past scientific contributions to campus and the Department of Integrative Biology (video linked here).
 

Integrative Biology graduate student Robert Leija and the whole Professor George Brooks Lab make a discovery. The study was part of a larger NIH-funded study to determine how well people switch from fat to carbohydrate metabolism as they age. Read the Berkeley News Article.
 

CT scans of animal skeletons are now available to anyone, including those with 3D printers. Read about the scans here...

Justice Williams and Stephen Eun Song, 2023 IBSURE interns.

The IB Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (IB SURE) Program has now opened it's application. This program is for undergraduates or recent undergraduates who are considering a graduate degree in the biological sciences. Program runs from May 31 - Aug 9, 2024. Interested students should apply by April 1, 2024. See here for more information.

Phred Benham, a postdoc in the Bowie Lab.

A new genomic analysis of Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) from around the state — many of them collected as far back as 1889, their specimens stored in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley — shows that over the past 128 years, the Bay Area's sparrow's adaptation to salt water is being diminished by interbreeding with inland sparrows adapted to fresh water. Read More...

A new study by IB researchers (Professor Cindy Looy, PhD alum Rosemary Romero, and BA alum Tony Huynh) and collaborators shows that kelp flourished off the Northwest Coast more than 32 million years ago, long before the appearance of modern groups of marine mammals, sea urchins, birds and bivalves that today call the forests home.

Credit: Keren Mevorach; copyright UC Museum of Paleontology

As part of the "Lost Women of Science" podcast, Scientific American just shared a new episode. This episode features Annie Alexander, the founder of Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and a major contributor to many of the natural history research collections at UC Berkeley. Katie Hafner and Carol Sutton Lewis visit the UC Berkeley collections (all closely tied to the Department of Integrative Biology) to learn more...

illustration by Julie Johnson

Why do plants, mushrooms, microbes and even some animals make chemicals like these with life-saving, life-enhancing, and even life-ending properties? Read Professor Noah Whiteman's recent article in TIME Magazine to learn more!

Dr. Robert Dudley, Professor of Integrative Biology at Berkeley, shares some fascinating hummingbird findings in a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Read more...