EGSB News

As conventional antibiotics continue to lose effectiveness against evolving pathogens, scientists are keen to employ the bacteria-killing techniques perfected by bacteriophages (phages), the viruses that infect bacteria. One major challenge is the difficulty of studying individual phage proteins and determining precisely how the virus wields these tools to kill their host bacteria. A team of researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Texas A&M University worked together on a high-throughput genetic screen to identify which part of the bacteria the phages were targeting.

A new machine learning tool developed by a team of researchers led by Justin Reese of Berkeley Lab and Peter Robinson of Jackson Lab analyzes electronic health records to find symptoms in common between people who have been diagnosed with long COVID and to define subtypes of the condition.

With $10.65 million in support from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), a new Energy Frontier Research Center based at Michigan State University (MSU) has been established. Led by Cheryl Kerfeld, a professor in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, the Center for Catalysis in Biomimetic Confinement (CCBC) will explore how nature compartmentalizes some of its most important biochemical reactions.

The projects of 22 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY23 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program.

Through a collaborative effort, researchers have identified a protein in soil viruses that may promote soil health. The work was enabled in part by a community data portal of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Using 5,000 images of crystalized samples cloned and synthesized by the JGI, scientists have begun the complex process of uncovering the hidden secrets of soil viruses.