BSE News

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced today 38 new National Laboratory collaborations with small businesses through its Small Business Vouchers (SBV) pilot. In this third round the following National Laboratories are included: Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Savannah River National Laboratory.

Berkeley Lab will collaborate with four small businesses. One of them is Kalion Inc. based in Milton, Massachusetts who will use the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Demonstration Unit’s capabilities. ABPDU and Kalion’s goal is to reach full manufacturing-scale production of glucaric acid and glucuronic acid by creating a manufacturing-ready production strain and then scaling up that strain to generate an appropriate process. The availability of such a process will expand the food, pharma, and polymer applications requiring a purity of more than 99 percent. Read more in the Berkeley Lab Newscenter.

Among the benefits of attending the University of California is the chance for undergrads to conduct research alongside world-renowned faculty. Biosciences’ Rasha Anayah and undergraduate student interning at JBEI (Biological Systems & Engineering Division), who is exploring how to build better biofuels, was one of several undergrads who recently spoke at a forum on UC research opportunities. Read more in the UC Newsroom.

Biosciences Postdoctoral Researcher Estelle Schaefer was the lead author of a new study on plant cell division orientation released by Science on April XX. The study developed while Schaefer was affiliated with the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in France and provides further insight into the actual mechanics of cell division in plants.

One phase of the cell division cycle is called mitosis, which is when replicated chromosomes are separated into two new nuclei. Mitosis occurs in several steps and in plants includes preprophase. Schaefer’s work focused on the preprophase band of microtubules, intracellular structures responsible for various movements within cells, and showed that this band controls the robustness of cell division orientation and consequent plant development.

Since completing her PhD three years ago, Schaefer has worked in the field of cell wall biosynthesis with Henrik Scheller (Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division) at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). She will soon transition to the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) where she will work with John Vogel to study the interactions between Brachypodium roots and microbes of the rhizosphere.

The April 1 issue of The Scientist magazine profiled Mina Bissell, Distinguished Scientist at the Biosciences’ Biological Systems and Engineering Division. The article covers Bissell’s pioneering work in cancer research over the period of 40 years and how she was instrumental in researching the field of tumor microenvironments. Read more at The Scientist.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Sandia National Laboratories working at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have resolved the protein structure of the enzyme LigM, which is utilized by the soil bacterium Sphingomonas to metabolize aryl compounds derived from lignin, the stiff, organic material that gives plants their structure. Their work is reported in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more in the Berkeley Lab News Center.