Message from the Chair
The mission of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine is to support and promote research and teaching in molecular cell biology in the School of Medicine at UCSD. The Department was first established as an autonomous Division in 1990 and was departmentalized in 1999. It is one of only two basic science departments in the School of Medicine at UCSD. It consists of 23 faculty, more than 100 postdoctoral scholars, ~50 graduate students and over 80 staff. The Department plays a major role in the teaching the medical student and graduate student curricula in molecular cell biology.
Cell biology remains the central discipline for the postgenomic era. More than 50 years ago E. B. Wilson wrote, "The key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the cell." Nearly 150 years ago, Virchow in his famous book, Cellular Pathology wrote that "All diseases are reducible to active or passive disturbances in cells".
Today cell biology has become the central basic science discipline in Biomedical research and in medical practice. It bridges biochemistry and structural biology to clinical medicine. Modern day cell biologists have the unprecedented opportunity to understand basic cellular processes as well as their derangements in diseases in molecular termsoften referred to as Molecular Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine. Todays molecular cell biologists utilize information obtained from biochemistry, genetic, and molecular approaches as well as sophisticated morphological techniques such as deconvolution, confocal and video microscopy and electron microscopy to the study of basic problems in cell biology and molecular medicine. They also take advantage of insights gained from proteomics, genomics and bioinformatics analyses. With the mapping of the human genome, the challenge becomes to understand the role of individual proteins and genes in cell function and disease. Thus the challenging frontier for the postgenomic era is centered in modern molecular cell biology.
Areas of Faculty Research
The areas of investigation that are particularly well developed in the department at present include signaling during membrane trafficking, transcriptional regulation, role of molecular motors in vesicular trafficking, cell cycle control, mitosis, RNA splicing, cancer cell biology, stem cell biology and glycobiology. These topics are investigated in a wide variety of organisms from yeast to mammals. Many investigators are taking advantage of powerful genetic approaches available from the use of yeast, Drosophila, C. elegans and mice to study normal cell processes as well as to generate disease models by knocking out specific genes. The department has grown from 18 in 1990 to ~250 in 2006. Each of the faculty is working at the cutting edge of his or her discipline and is well funded. See individual web pages.
Seminar Series
The Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine offers a weekly seminar series bringing in outstanding scientists from other institutions to present their work. In addition, graduate students in molecular cell biology can participate in journal clubs and in an in-house seminar series and gain experience in presenting their work to the cell biology community.
Shared Facilities
Individual faculty operate core facilities in mouse phenotype analysis, modern, sophisticated techniques for confocal and deconvolution microscopy, electron microscopy, immunocytochemistry, immunoelectron microscopy, and glycobiology. Several faculty have spearheaded the development of the new Genomics Core at UCSD.
Graduate Studies
In the School of Medicine graduate training in cell biology is centered in the Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program where it constitutes one of the main areas of study. There are abundant opportunities within the department to investigate problems in modern molecular cell biology with investigators who are internationally recognized and working at the cutting edge of their discipline.
Location:
The majority of the faculty and the business office are centered in the George Palade Laboratories for Cellular and Molecular Medicine, the CMM-East and Leichtag Buildings. Individual faculty are also located in the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Natural Sciences Building.
