Postdoctoral fellow Jeffrey Groh led a study on the genetic explanation of avocado pollination. All avocado trees are hermaphrodites, but until now, it was unclear how avocado flowers function as female in the morning and male in the afternoon (A-type plants), while B-type plants follow the opposite pattern. Read the full story in UC Davis News.
IB professor Jack Tseng, former IB undergrad Leah Kahn, former visiting postdoctoral scholar Adolfo Pacheco-Castro, and collaborators at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the National Autonomous University of Mexico documented fossil evidence indicating that animals from different latitudes of North and South America intermingled before the formation of the Panamanian land bridge, which linked the two continents. Read the full story in Berkeley News.
Led by FAVE Lab NSF/Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow Narimane Chatar, alongside Huelsenbeck Lab PhD student Levi Raskin, former IB visiting scholars Alex Ramos and Melvin Vankelst, and IB professor Jack Tseng, the team published a paper on mammalian dental evolution. Read the full story, featured as the cover article in Science.
IB professor Cindy Looy, grad student Jaemin Lee, former doctoral student Dori Contreras, and former undergrad student James Saulsbury reported that Dori's Tuff flora contained large fruits from flowering trees, suggesting that animals were eating larger seeds produced by angiosperms 75 million years ago. Read the full story in Berkeley News.
Postdoctoral fellow Narimane Chatar is researching carnivore molars in the lab of IB professor Jack Tseng. Chatar discovers the cranial and mandibular remains of Adelphailurus kansensis and compares them to Smilodon, the most recognizable saber-toothed cat. Read the full story in Berkeley News.
IB professor Peter Sudmant and Ph.D. candidate Michael Singer are researching the "extreme" immune systems of bats through long-read sequencing which provides data for predicting and preventing future bat-borne viral transmission to human populations. Read the full story in Berkeley Inspire.
Laura Alexander, IB PhD 2025, made the cover of Nature Health as a co-first author on her major study entitled "Ecological and demographic drivers of Oropouche virus transmission". Read the full article here.
A new study co-led by IB Professor Rauri Bowie utilizes advanced genomics to split the gentoo penguin into four separate species—marking the first new penguin species identified in over 100 years. Read the full article in Berkeley News.
Professor Rasmus Nielsen is a winner of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship this year. His laboratory works on the development and application of statistical and computational methods for analyzing genomic data in the context of evolutionary genetics, population genetics and medical genetics. Read the announcement in the Berkeley News.
The photograph on the April 2 cover of Science magazine features an image of an octopus mating captured by the late Roy Caldwell, professor emeritus of integrative biology at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. Read the tribute to Professor Caldwell in Science, contributed by Robert Full, Eileen A. Lacey, Tony Morelli, and Michael Caldwell.