UVa Biology

How do animals sense light without always "seeing" it? In a new Knowable Magazine article, UVA Professor Iggy Provencio explains how opsins enable everything from sight to light-driven behaviors, revealing the surprising ways animals interact with their environment.

The body’s hidden light detectors From camouflage to timekeeping to wound healing, light-sensing proteins called opsins perform all kinds of jobs in nature beyond helping creatures to see

New research from the lab of Drew Schield, offers insights into the process biologists call the speciation continuum — the gradual, and often messy, process whereby one species slowly loses the ability to interbreed with another.

Rattlesnake DNA Offers Clues to One of Evolution’s Biggest Mysteries UVA researchers use rattlesnakes to investigate one of evolutionary biology’s oldest puzzles.

Congratulations to the Winners of the 42nd Annual Richard D. Katz Undergraduate Biology Symposium - From left to right in the photo, taking First Place was Lilah Elhady (Are cytoplasmic factors responsible for male sterility in Campanula americana?; Galloway Lab). Second Place was won by Madeline Livingston (Genetic diversity of the meiotic recombination protein PRDM9 in rattlesnakes ; Schield Lab), with Margaret Berberian taking Third Place (Perturbing IL-15-mediated self-renewal of human memory CD8+ cells; Luckey Lab). https://bio.as.virginia.edu/congratulations-winners-42nd-annual-richard-d-katz-undergraduate-biology-symposium

Please join me in congratulating John Campbell on his new NIH award, "Unraveling Neural Circuits for Body Weight Control with Molecular Connectomics.”

Body weight in mammals is oppositely controlled by two populations of neurons in the hypothalamus, which integrate information from many other brain regions. Using a new connectomics approach, the Campbell lab is identifying previously unknown sources of input to these neurons and connections among them, revealing new mechanisms that may help control body weight.

Congratulations John!

UVA Study Reveals How New Weight-Loss Drugs Reshape the Brain - Congratulations, Ali, the Guler lab, and all those involved!

UVA Study Reveals How New Weight-Loss Drugs Reshape the Brain Findings published in Nature uncover how next-generation GLP-1 drugs affect reward pathways, offering new insight for medicine, industry and the public.