EGSB News

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.

Two scientists in the Area, Greg Hura and Vivek Mutalik, are heading up research projects that are part of the Department of Energy’s Biopreparedness Research Virtual Environment (BRaVE) initiative. Yasuo Yoshikuni, a scientist at the Joint Genome Institute, is part of a third project that is being led by Brookhaven National Laboratory. These projects will leverage bioimaging expertise to develop better therapies and vaccines for viruses, develop a high-throughput platform to rapidly design countermeasures to drug-resistant pathogens, and unlock the molecular basis of plant-pathogen interactions to create resilient bioenergy crops.

The scientific and national security communities have long shared an unmet need for a tool capable of quickly and reliably distinguishing genetically modified organisms from naturally occurring ones. Over the course of a six-year program funded by the United States Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), several techniques were developed and refined. Biosciences Area researchers led testing and evaluation of these technologies, designing and producing biological samples of increasing complexity to assess how well the tools performed.

A team of researchers from the Joint BioEnergy Institute’s (JBEI) Feedstocks Division has, for the first time, developed a genome-scale way to map the regulatory role of transcription factors, the proteins that play a key role in gene expression and determining a plant’s physiological traits. Their work reveals unprecedented insights into gene regulatory networks and identifies a new library of DNA parts that can be used to optimize genetic engineering efforts in plants.