The University of California, Davis, is one of four institutions nationwide selected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to establish Animal and Veterinary Innovation centers to help spur innovation and advance regulatory decisions. 

The UC Davis Intentional Genomic Alteration Innovation Center will focus on genome editing of livestock like pigs, sheep and cattle to support science-based regulations that demonstrate the safety of the technology and pave the way for human consumption of edited animals. 

Maci Mueller, who earned her doctoral and master’s degrees in animal biology at UC Davis, is the winner of the 2024 Kinsella Memorial Prize for her leadership and work developing novel breeding technologies for cattle.

Mueller graduated in 2023 and is now an assistant professor at Kansas State University where she focuses on animal genomics and biotechnology.

The African Orphan Crops Consortium, or AOCC, launched with a lofty goal in 2013: to help local scientists develop more nutritious, productive and resilient varieties of commonly used but rarely studied crops to improve public health.

Growing wheat in drought conditions may be easier in the future, thanks to new genetic research out of the University of California, Davis.

An international team of scientists found that the right number of copies of a specific group of genes can stimulate longer root growth, enabling wheat plants to pull water from deeper supplies. The resulting plants have more biomass and produce higher grain yield, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.