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Biosciences Area Cohosts Conference on Growing the Circular Bioeconomy
The Biosciences Area recently joined the California Air Resources Board, UC Berkeley, and UC’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources in co-hosting the California Bioresources Economy Summit, aimed at harnessing biotechnology to convert California waste streams from farms, forests, and landfills into valuable low-carbon fuels and products. Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences Mary Maxon keynoted the two-day conference as it kicked off January 29 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley. In her presentation, Maxon noted that expansion of the $370 billion per year U.S. bioeconomy could create more than 1 million jobs while reducing annual carbon emissions by up…
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Scientists Develop Higher-performance Fuels, Biofuels and Bioproducts
Researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and the Advanced Biofuels & Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU), part of the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division, have developed a new polyketide synthase-based platform and prototyped efficient production of potential biofuels, gasoline additives, and commodity chemicals.
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Building Standards for Neurophysiology Data
Researchers from Berkeley Lab and the Allen Institute for Brain Science will receive $2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a next-generation data format and software ecosystem for the Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology (NWB:N) project. With funding from the Kavli Foundation, Berkeley Lab scientists Oliver Ruebel and Andrew Tritt in the Computational Research Division and Kristofer Bouchard in the Biological Systems and Engineering Division led the development of the beta version of NWB:N 2.0, and will continue to advance the development of NWB:N as part of the NIH BRAIN Initiative. Berkeley Lab’s leadership in the NWB:N…
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Metabolic Engineering of Lipids Improves the Respiratory Function of Biofuels and Bioproducts Hosts
While much is known about how enzymes and molecules are involved in cellular respiration, the understanding of the respiration system as a whole remains limited. Researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have gained insight into how cellular respiration is affected by the membrane environment in which it occurs. By engineering lipid synthesis to carefully control the membrane composition, researchers found that lipids, which consist of fatty acid molecules and determine membrane viscosity, also tightly control the rate of bacterial and yeast respiration. As lipid synthesis in these hosts is often engineered in order to produce…
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Biosciences Researchers Take Part in DOE’s Energy I-Corps Program
Two teams of Biosciences Area researchers are representing Berkeley Lab as part of cohort eight of the U.S. Department of Energy’s I-Corps program, an intensive two-month training course that pairs national laboratory researchers with industry mentors to develop viable market pathways for their technologies. The teams, led by Deepti Tanjore and Esther Singer, presented their projects during the opening session held October 1–5 in Golden, Colorado.
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