EGSB News

Two senior scientists in the Biosciences Area, Jian-Hua Mao and Trent Northen, are newly named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Cheryl Kerfeld’s laboratory, which operates at both Michigan State University and Berkeley Lab, teamed up with researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Delaware to take a first step toward creating artificial cells that lack a lipid membrane.

Most organisms use oxygen to convert food into energy. However, in environments with little or no oxygen, life had found other ways to produce energy, using a process called fermentation. To better understand the range of bacteria and archaea that rely on this form of metabolism, researchers at UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara recently compiled a list of with more than 8,300 organisms from multiple sources, including the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase). The researchers also built an interactive browser that allows other researchers to study the genomes and predict the metabolic abilities of microbes that are likely to thrive in environments with little or no oxygen.

Three University of California, Davis, Faculty Fellows have been awarded $25,000 each to spearhead cross-campus research projects with Berkeley Lab scientists in the field of agricultural decarbonization. With agricultural activities contributing over 10% of the United States’ total greenhouse gas emissions, the sector is a prime target for lowering emissions and addressing the climate crisis. The teams will explore innovative methods to remove and store excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a practice known as carbon sequestration—and minimize energy consumption in crop production.

Fabricated ecosystems—EcoFABs—are plastic, takeout box–sized growth chambers developed at Berkeley Lab to be a standardized and reproducible platform for conducting experiments on model plants and the microbes that live around their roots. A greater understanding of how plants and microbes work together to store vast amounts of atmospheric carbon in the soil will help in the design of better bioenergy crops for the fight against climate change.