UCSF is a leading university dedicated to defining health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. We traveled across the bay to the Mission Bay campus where we met up with former MSI research associate David Pincus who showed us the QB3 facilities. We toured the labs and wandered through the community center (yes, the have a pool on the roof). We compared notes about summer research projects with members of the UCSF iGEM team from Lincoln HighSchool.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) was created in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping, DNA sequencing, technology development, and information sciences pioneered at the DOE genome centers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). We met up with some interns from LBNL and toured the production sequencing facility in Walnut Creek. We learned how they sequence entire genomes and the importance of comparative genomics. We learned about the roles that different people play at the institute- from production work to sequence analysis and data dissemination. We were most impressed with the automated colony picker –and would have liked to take one back to MSI to pick mutants for our own experiments.

Each year 350-500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide, and over one million people die, most of them young children in sub-Saharan Africa. Resistance to chloroquine-based drugs has developed, but the faster-acting, more effective artemisinin-based drugs are too expensive for large-scale use in the countries where they are needed most. Amyris' synthetic biologists have created a process by which artemisinin can be cheaply produced in microorganisms. After an excellent introduction to their malaria and biofuels research we met some of the many excellent scientists there and toured the labs (and found out that coli rollers came in all those colors). We met with founding scientist Kinkead Reiling and learned about the challenges and satisfying aspects of starting up a biotechnology company.

MSI is a short walk away from UC Berkeley the flagship of the UC System and one of the most prestigious public research universities in the country. We met with students from the UC Berkeley Biology Scholars Program and Alissa Myrick the pre-graduate pathway program coordinator. BSP is an undergraduate program at UC Berkeley designed to promote the success of students from economic, gender, ethnic and cultural groups historically underrepresented in the biological sciences. Funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the goal of BSP is to diversify who participates in science, thereby benefiting the discipline and our larger society. After an informal lunch with some BSP students we took a tour of some labs on campus and learned about research being conducted in those labs.