BSE News

JBEI’s Sarah LaFrance volunteered this week at “Dinner with a Scientist” organized by the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Since 2009, OUSD has been hosting “Dinner with a Scientist” in order to bring together local scientists, teachers, and students to celebrate science.

Sarah interacted with 4th and 5th graders from OUSD to explain how plants can be turned into biofuels and why JBEI is developing alternative energy sources. She brought an Arabidopsis specimen to the event, which is used as a model plant in JBEI’s research, and each student got to take an Arabidopsis seedling home. Sarah answered many questions about bioenergy and her role as a technology expert at the lab.

To learn more about this event visit http://science.ousd.org/dinner.htm

The development of omics technologies, such as metabolomics and proteomics, and systems biology have dramatically enhanced our ability to understand biological phenomena. Nevertheless the interpretation of large omics data into meaningful ‘knowledge’ as well as the understanding of complex metabolic interactions in engineered microbes remains challenging. Biological Systems & Engineering Division researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and led by principal investigator Taek Soon Lee, have developed a workflow that integrates various omics data and genome-scale models to study the effects of biofuel production in a microbial host. Read more on the JBEI website.

Karen Davies, staff scientist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, and Jenny Mortimer, Director of Plant Systems Biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, are two of 50 extraordinary scientists under the age of 40 who have been selected to participate alongside business and political leaders in the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, which is taking place from June 26-28 in Tianjin, China.

Scientists at JBEI have engineered a strain of bacteria that enables a “one-pot” method for producing advanced biofuels from a slurry of pre-treated plant material. The achievement is a critical step in making biofuels a viable competitor to fossil fuels. Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center.

Delegates of the US-Australia City Exchange on Innovation Ecosystems, presented by the Future Cities Collaborative, an initiative of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney visited JBEI on May 5. The delegates from New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia are visiting several cities in the United States to learn how to plan, finance, implement and support innovation districts in their cities. Their first stop was Emeryville. EmeryStation East, where JBEI is located, was presented as the hub of clean energy and a key space for research in in life, physical and nano sciences. Read more about the Future Cities Collaborative US tour.