Dr. Donald Kohn, professor of Microbiology, Immunology, & Molecular Genetics, and member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research, and his colleagues have demonstrated that a combination of chemotherapy and gene therapy may help doctors treat children with “bubble boy” disease, in which the body cannot successfully fight off germs.

Michael Alfaro, UCLA associate professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is senior author of a new study that suggests that ‘adaptive zones’ limits species number.

Dr. Hanna Mikkola, Associate Professor of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology and her team have found that precursor cells in the endothelium that normally generate blood stem cells can become beating cardiomyocytes, or heart muscle cells.

Van Savage, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Assistant Professor, Samraat Pawar, a post-doctoral scholar in Savage’s group, and their collaborators have demonstrated for the first time that the relationship between animals’ body size and their feeding rate — the overall amount of food they consume per unit of time — is largely determined by the properties of the space in which they search for their food.

Lawren Sack, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, along with graduate student Christine Scoffoni, three UCLA undergraduate researchers, and colleagues have discovered new laws that determine the construction of leaf vein systems as leaves grow and evolve. The research, has a range of fundamental implications for global ecology and allows researchers to estimate original leaf sizes from just a fragment of a leaf. W improve scientists’ prediction and interpretation of climate in the deep past from leaf fossils.