BSE News

During their annual food drive, JBEI and ABPDU raised food and funds for the Alameda County Community Food Bank. A total of $2514 was raised in monetary contributions for the Virtual Food Drive. A friendly competition was promoted between ABPDU and JBEI’s Divisions to see which group could raise more pounds of food. JBEI’s Operations staff collected the highest number of pounds of food this year. This initiative helped raise awareness of food insecurity of children, adults and seniors in the Alameda County. To learn more about how you can help visit http://www.accfb.org/.

New images of structural fibers inside a cell appear in a study featured on the cover of the Journal of Cell Science special issue on 3D Cell Biology, published this month. The images, obtained by scientists in the Biosciences Area, show thread-like cytofilaments reaching into and traversing a human breast cell’s chromatin-packed nucleus. It provides the first visual evidence of a physical link by which genes can receive mechanical cues from its microenvironment.

The work leading up to the images began in the early 1980s when Biological Systems & Engineering’s Mina Bissell proposed the idea that gene expression and cell fate were dependent on their physical surroundings called extracellular matrix. The images were captured by Manfred Auer, staff scientist, and Ke Xu, faculty scientist, both in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division. Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center.

The Biosciences Area launched its Twitter account one year ago. @LBNLBioSci has served as a tool to disseminate the Area’s achievements in energy, environment and health, and has so far attracted 409 followers. To celebrate the one year anniversary, the Biosciences communications team has released a listicle on seven of the Area’s bacterial, fungal and microbial discoveries. Read the listicle here and follow @LBNLBioSci.

Jay Keasling,  Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences was featured in Create, Engineers Australia’s Magazine. In the article Keasling discusses how synthetic biology tools offer solutions to some of the major global challenges. Read more.

JBEI develops new synthetic biology tools for engineering Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Pioneering work has been led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) to engineer microbes to transform plant derived starting materials into energy-rich biofuels. But despite the progress in genomics and synthetic biology for the optimization of biofuel production in engineered microbes, microbial engineering methods remain slow and laborious. Such is the case of the fungal host, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The yeast S. cerevisiae has proven to be an excellent organism for commercial-scale production of biological molecules, though its strain development remains painstakingly slow due to difficulties related to the combined effect of different expression parts and host conditions. Now, researchers at JBEI have developed the largest, most comprehensive Cas9-based toolkit to quickly institute genetic changes in S. cerevisiae to optimize heterologous gene expression.