EGSB News

The Department of Energy has announced that eight distinguished scientists and engineers will receive the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of DOE’s highest honors. Named after Berkeley Lab’s founder, the award was established in 1959 and recognizes mid-career researchers for exceptional contributions supporting the DOE and its mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States.

Viruses that infect bacteria, or phages, are continually evolving ways to target and exploit their specific hosts. Their bacterial hosts, in turn, are continually evolving means to evade the phages. These perpetual battles for survival yield incredibly diverse molecular arsenals that researchers are itching to study, yet doing so can be tedious and labor-intensive.

A team led by Berkeley Lab scientists has developed an efficient and inexpensive new method to gain insight into these defensive strategies. They reported in PLOS Biology that a combination of three recently developed techniques can reveal which bacterial receptors phages exploit to infect the cell, as well as what cellular mechanisms the bacteria use to respond to a phage infection.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which was founded in 1848 and is the world’s largest general scientific society, announced that 489 of its members—among them nine scientists at Berkeley Lab—have been named Fellows. This lifetime honor, which follows a nomination and review process, recognizes scientists, engineers, and innovators for their distinguished achievements toward the advancement or applications of science.

The three newly named Fellows from the Biosciences Area are: Sanjay Kumar, a faculty scientist in the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division; Mary Maxon, the Associate Laboratory Director for the Biosciences Area; and Len Pennacchio, a senior scientist in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division and the Deputy of Genomic Technologies at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI).

Microorganisms play key roles in regulating global nutrient cycles but only a small fraction has been identified and an even smaller number has been successfully cultured in a lab for study. In Nature Biotechnology, the known diversity of bacteria and archaea has now expanded by 44% through a publicly available collection of more than 52,000 microbial genomes from environmental samples. Of that number, 70% of the novel genome sequences were previously unknown, not yet cultured in the lab. The work results from a JGI-led collaboration involving more than 200 scientists around the world, KBase and NERSC. Read more about the genomic catalog of Earth’s microbiomes on the JGI website.

A new project co-led by Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division scientist Christopher Mungall has received a $10 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS). An international, multi-institutional collaboration, the new center will develop tools to modernize how biomedical information about genetic conditions is captured, stored, and exchanged.