MBIB News

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded more than $40 million, distributed over five years, for a project that aims to compare two positron emission tomography (PET) imaging agents widely used to visualize misfolded tau protein—one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer disease (AD) and other dementias—in living brains. The effort will be led by co-principal investigators Suzanne Baker, a computational staff scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, and Tharick Pascoal, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt).

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced that 564 of its members—among them four scientists at Berkeley Lab—have been elected Fellows as part of the 2021 class. The two newly named Fellows from the Biosciences Area are: Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, and Scott Baker an affiliate with the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).

Nicholas Sauter, a computer senior scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, is co-leading a team working to provide a better way for scientists to study the structures of the many materials that don’t form tidy single crystals. Their new technique, called small-molecule serial femtosecond X-ray crystallography, or smSFX, supercharges traditional crystallography with the addition of custom-built image processing algorithms and an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL). In a paper published in Nature, the team demonstrated proof-of-principle for smSFX and reported the previously unknown structures of two metal-organic materials known as chacogenolates.

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Program recently awarded $21 million to 21 University of California, Berkeley researchers. Of this group, four are faculty scientists in the Biosciences Area.

CRISPR enzymes are like super scissors: they cut, delete, and add genes to a specific kind of cell, one at a time. But now, UC Berkeley faculty and Biosciences Area researchers have figured out how to add or modify genes within a microbial community of many different species, coining the phrase, “community editing.”