News

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced that 564 of its members—among them four scientists at Berkeley Lab—have been elected Fellows as part of the 2021 class. The two newly named Fellows from the Biosciences Area are: Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, and Scott Baker an affiliate with the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Program recently awarded $21 million to 21 University of California, Berkeley researchers. Of this group, four are faculty scientists in the Biosciences Area.

On April 29, 2021, Berkeley Lab hosted a second workshop to identify the most pressing barriers to wider adoption of single-cell sequencing and omics technologies, and to discuss solutions to remedy those barriers in order to drive discovery. The workshop report is now available for download.

One of the tools that researchers can apply to study the transcription factors that control how genes are turned on is known as DNA affinity purification sequencing or DAP-seq. The technology was developed by Ronan O’Malley, who leads the JGI Sequencing Technologies Group. In a Nature Methods article, JGI researchers led by co-first authors Leo Baumgart and Juna Lee developed two approaches that build upon the DAP-seq technology O’Malley developed.  Read more here on the JGI website.

Enabled by the JGI’s Community Science Program, a team led by University of British Columbia researchers tracked the impact of a large-scale heatwave event in the ocean known as “The Blob.” The microbial communities in the ocean drive the biological pump that takes carbon from the atmosphere and keeps it in the deep ocean. With genomic samples collected before, during and after The Blob, the researchers developed a preliminary model of how marine microbial communities are affected by warming events. They recently shared their findings in Communications Biology. The work underscores the value of large-scale research collaborations and of conducting even more time-series studies.

Learn more here on the JGI website.