Reengineering Cells To See

Dirk Trauner has a grand vision. The UC Berkeley chemist hopes that the success he and his colleagues have had making blind cells "see" could someday lead to a cure for human blindness. "We've borrowed one of nature's molecular machines, reengineered it, and put it back into a cell to add new functionality," he says. "If you could re-educate a neuron to be light sensitive, you might be able to create an artificial retina."

A Flare-Up In Solar Physics

The sun is the solar system's biggest powder keg. Solar flares, tremendous explosions on the sun's surface, can release the equivalent energy of 10 billion megatons of TNT in just a few minutes. The explosions sometimes interfere with terrestrial radio communications and might put astronauts' lives in jeopardy, but the complex phenomena that ignite the flares remain much of a mystery. Six hundred kilometers above the earth though, a small satellite operated by UC Berkeley astrophysicist Robert Lin and his colleagues is shedding some light on the sun's unrest.

Fly Guy

Nestled inside the human genome, there may be another secret code waiting to be deciphered. The human genome is now thought to contain 22,000 or so genes that code for proteins, the building blocks of life. But how are such a small number of genes programmed to embark on widely different paths of development? In other words, says UC Berkeley molecular and cell biologist Michael Levine, "what puts your head on top of your shoulders and not in your rear end?" To answer that question, Levine has spent several decades reigning over his genetics laboratory as lord of the flies.

A computer-generated visualization of a potassium ion channel structure. (courtesy the researchers)