BSE News

Berkeley Lab played host to 31 neuroscience experts from across the country who came to participate in the fifth Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology (NWB:N) project hackathon. The event was organized locally by Computing Sciences Area researchers Oliver Ruebel and Andrew Tritt, and Biosciences’ Kristofer Bouchard, a computational biologist in Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE).

The 7th Annual East Bay STEM Career Awareness Day took place on April 26 at Wareham Development’s Aquatic Park Center in West Berkeley, home to Biosciences Operations @ Berkeley and several Area research groups. The event, organized by the Institute for STEM Education housed at California State University East Bay, had support from Berkeley Lab and several East Bay-based businesses.

The projects of 13 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY18 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. These projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including the study of microbiomes in relation to patterns of mutualism, crop productivity, and gut health; synthetic biology for engineering biosurfactant production and energy conversion pathways; and the application of technologies such as machine learning, high-resolution optical microscopy, and single-cell transcriptomics. Together, these efforts account for 18.75 percent of the $20 million allocated. Lab-wide, 74 projects were selected from a field of 215.

The Lab’s Computing Sciences and Biosciences Areas jointly held a week-long workshop focused on machine learning in data science, the goal of which was to build bridges through a common foundation in statistical computing. Thirty attendees from Biosciences, Computing Sciences, and Lab IT received hands-on training provided by Data Incubator before engaging in a “hackathon” to apply the techniques to relevant science problems and data sets.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new enzyme that will enable microbial production of a renewable alternative to petroleum-based toluene, a widely used octane booster in gasoline that has a global market of twenty nine million tons per year.