BSE News

As Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Director Nigel Mouncey and Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division Director Blake Simmons shared in their June 4 emails, Nick Everson will rejoin the JGI as Deputy for Operations starting on July 1. He will succeed Ray Turner, who will retire from Berkeley Lab on June 29.

Three projects, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), leverage Berkeley Lab’s strengths in artificial intelligence, sensors, and ecological biology to make agriculture more sustainable and more profitable. They aim to quantify and reduce the carbon intensity of agriculture—including the farming of biofuel feedstocks such as corn, soy, and sorghum—while also increasing yield. Two of the new projects are part of the SMARTFARM program of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). This initiative aspires to make the biofuel supply chain carbon negative, which would greatly improve biofuel’s benefits to the broader economy and environment.

Berkeley Lab researchers with expertise in lasers and in biology are working together to develop a platform and experiments to study the structure and components of viruses and to learn how they interact with their surrounding environment. The experiments could provide new insight on how to reduce the infectiousness of viruses such as the one causing COVID-19.

A team of researchers from two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories has found new evidence of tangible connections between the gut and the brain. The team, led by Antoine Snijders at Berkeley Lab and Janet Jansson at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), identified lactate—a molecule produced by all species of one gut microbe—as a key memory-boosting molecular messenger. The work was published in the journal BMC Microbiome.

Berkeley Lab is part of a multi-laboratory working group that recently received DOE Office of Science funding under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to conduct R&D to help improve the nation’s COVID-19 testing capabilities. Three of our Biosciences Area researchers are helping to lead the Lab’s efforts.