Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) are using synthetic biology to give plants the ability to create molecules never seen before in nature. New research led by Patrick Shih, director of Plant Biosystems Design at JBEI, and Beth Sattely of Stanford University describes success in swapping enzymes between plants to engineer new synthetic metabolic pathways. These pathways gave plants the ability to create new classes of chemical compounds, some of which have enhanced properties.
Providing New Technologies for Vaccine Development
A team of scientists led by David Baker at the University of Washington developed a method to design artificial proteins to serve as a framework for viral antigens. Their study was published recently in the journal eLife. Berkeley Lab scientists collected data at the Advanced Light Source to visualize the atomic structure and determine the dynamics of the designed scaffolds.
Congratulations to Biosciences Area Director’s Award Recipients
Numerous Biosciences Area personnel are among the 2020 Berkeley Lab Director’s Awards honorees. This annual program recognizes outstanding contributions by employees to all facets of Lab activities. A complete list of winners can be found here. The ninth annual Director’s Awards ceremony will take place (virtually) on November 12 at 3 PM.
Machine Learning Takes on Synthetic Biology: Algorithms Can Bioengineer Cells for You
Engineering biological systems to specification–for example, designing a microbe to produce a cancer-fighting agent–requires a detailed mechanistic understanding of how all the parts of a cell work. Typically, this knowledge is acquired through years of painstaking work and a fair amount of trial and error. But Berkeley Lab scientists have created an Automated Recommendation Tool (ART) that adapts machine learning algorithms to the needs of synthetic biology to guide development systematically. With a limited set of training data, the algorithms are able to predict how changes in a cell’s DNA or biochemistry will affect its behavior, then make recommendations for the next engineering cycle along with probabilistic predictions for attaining the desired goal. The work was led by Hector Garcia Martin, a researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division and Tijana Radivojevic, a BSE data scientist. In a pair of papers recently published in the journal Nature Communications, they presented the algorithm and demonstrated its capabilities.
Read more in the Berkeley Lab News Center.
James Hurley Awarded $7M to Study Role of Mitophagy in Parkinson’s Disease
The Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative has awarded James Hurley, a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, $7 million over three years to investigate the role of damaged mitochondria in the disease. The grant is among 21, totaling $161 million, announced by the ASAP initiative, which aims to fund basic research to close gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms of Alzheimer’s Disease and its progression.
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