EGSB News

Four undergraduate students from Arizona State University (ASU), all of Native American heritage, participated in an eight-week summer internship at Berkeley Lab as part of the ASU-Berkeley Lab STEM Pathways program.

Scientists have discovered flagella in an unexpected place: hot spring-dwelling bacteria from the phylum Chloroflexota. Research shows that flagella were lost in other forms of Chloroflexota that adapted to marine environments hundreds of millions of years ago.

Anne Villacastin placed first and was also selected as People’s Choice in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 21, 2023. Villacastin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, detailed her research on sorghum’s potential as a biomanufacturing feedstock. In its sixth … Read more »

Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division Director Susannah Tringe will direct one of two new Berkeley Lab-hosted centers as part of DOE’s Energy Earthshots Initiative. Tringe will lead the center focused on the Carbon Negative shot, dubbed RESTOR-C (Center for Restoration of Soil Carbon By Precision Biological Strategies), which will cultivate ways for plants and microbes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stably store it for more than 100 years in the soil.

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) are genetic entities that seek to replicate themselves and spread from cell to cell. Two of the most common forms of MGEs are viruses and plasmids. They can be found in virtually all of Earth’s ecosystems. A software tool recently described in Nature Biotechnology called geNomad identifies and classifies MGEs based upon their gene content and their genetic sequences. The software was created by researchers under the direction of JGI Microbiome Data Science Group Lead Nikos Kyrpides.