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Exploring Human Origins in the Uncharted Territory of Our Chromosomes
A group of geneticists from Berkeley Lab, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley are unraveling new details about human evolution by studying the uniquely regulated portion of our chromosomes that surround the centromeres. These stretches of DNA – termed centromere-proximal regions (CPRs) – are largely composed of highly repetitive, mostly non-gene-coding sequences that […]
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More Investment Needed for Machine Learning for Bioengineering
In an opinion piece published July 19 in ACS Synthetic Biology, Hector Garcia Martin and Tijana Radivojevic of the Biosciences Area’s Biological Systems & Engineering Division collaborated with Pablo Carbonell of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology’s SynBioChem Centre, to highlight the opportunities in a radical new approach to bioengineering that leverages the latest disruptive advances in machine learning.
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Blue Pigment from Engineered Fungi Could Help Turn the Textile Industry Green
Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute developed a new biosynthetic production pathway which could provide a sustainable alternative to conventional synthetic blue dye. The highly efficient fungi-based platform may also open the door for producing many other valuable biological compounds that are currently very hard to manufacture. Read more in the JBEI website.
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Turning the Switch on Biofuels
Imidazolium ionic liquid (IIL) solvents are one of the best sources for extracting sugars from plants. But the sugars from IIL-treated biomass are inevitably contaminated with residual IILs that inhibit growth in bacteria and yeast, blocking biochemical production by these organisms. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have identified a molecular mechanism in bacteria that can be manipulated to promote IIL tolerance, and therefore overcome a key gap in biofuel and biochemical production processes. The research appears in the Journal of Bacteriology. Read more in the JBEI website.
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X-ray Footprinting Reveals Molecular Basis of Orange Carotenoid Protein Photoprotection
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and Michigan State University (MSU), led by Corie Ralston and Cheryl Kerfeld, performed X-ray footprinting mass spectrometry (XFMS) experiments at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) beamline 5.3.1, which revealed new mechanistic details of the key events in orange carotenoid protein (OCP) photoprotection. XFMS is ideally suited to probing conformational dynamics at the single residue level, providing both a spatial and temporal view of site-specific changes in the OCP and its interaction with the fluorescence recovery protein (FRP). The experiments showed that FRP provides an extended binding region that holds the OCP together and forces proximity of…
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