EGSB News

A study aimed at identifying and examining the small messenger proteins used by microbes living on and inside humans has revealed an astounding diversity of more than 4,000 families of molecules – many of which have never been described previously. The research, led by Stanford University and now published in Cell, lays the groundwork for future investigations into how the trillions of bacteria, archaea, and fungi that compose human microbiomes compete for resources, attack and co-exist with one another, and interact with our own cells.

Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) faculty scientist Markita Landry and Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) faculty scientist Niren Murthy are among the seven UC Berkeley faculty named to the 2019-20 cohort of Bakar Fellows. The UCB program fosters faculty entrepreneurship in fields including engineering, computer science, the biological and physical sciences, and architecture. The honor is bestowed on researchers with novel ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit, giving them the money and time to translate their laboratory breakthroughs into technologies ready for the marketplace.

ExaSheds is a new project led by Berkeley Lab PI Carl Steefel of the Earth and Environmental Science Area (EESA) and Oak Ridge National Lab co-PI Scott Painter. It represents the first systematic effort to leverage powerful machine learning and exascale computing, applied to ever-larger and more-complex data obtained from watershed field observations, to gain a predictive understanding of watershed behavior. The project is funded by DOE Biological and Environmental Research and will initially take advantage of datasets being collected at the East River, Colorado watershed site, which has been developed as part of Berkeley Lab’s DOE Watershed Function Science Focus Area (SFA). The interdisciplinary research team includes Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division co-deputy Ben Brown, as well as partners at Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest National Labs.

Read more from EESA.

Berkeley Lab and Colorado School of Mines scientists are collaborating on the development of a microbe-based system that could remove toxic compounds from wastewater produced by the oil and gas industries so it can be reused in other water-intensive sectors such as agriculture and energy production. Leading the Berkeley Lab half of the partnership are … Read more »

Berkeley Lab geneticist Len Pennacchio and his team helped a group of Israeli clinical researchers solve the mystery of a rare inherited disease that causes extreme, sometimes fatal, chronic diarrhea in children. The nearly decade-long investigation not only led to the discovery of a novel protein-coding gene that is critical for intestinal function, but also expanded our understanding of regulatory sequences in the human genome. The results were recently published in Nature.