EGSB News

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.

A Berkeley Lab–led team of scientists has developed a new model that incorporates genetic information from microbes, enabling them to ascertain how soil microbes store carbon supplied by plant roots. The model could inform agricultural strategies to preserve carbon in the soil, supporting both plant growth and climate change mitigation.

Area researchers led a team that examined the microbial, chemical, and geological features of 11 wetland zones in the Bay Area. Their findings indicate that the factors governing how much greenhouse gas is stored or emitted in natural landscapes are more complex and difficult to predict than previously thought.

A team led by Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) staff scientist Vivek Mutalik demonstrated for the first time that they can, on a genome-wide scale, identify phage genes that are essential (or not) to infecting bacteria, and then replace non-essential DNA with distinctive barcode tags. These barcodes could enable investigators and clinicians to quickly identify and track different phages in diverse settings, similar to how product barcodes are used in supermarkets. Brought to scale, the method stands to unlock potent biotechnology applications relevant to agriculture, the environment, human health, and more.