MBIB News

When plants absorb more light energy than they can use—such as during a brief period of intense illumination—they have mechanisms to dissipate the excess energy as heat, thereby avoiding damage to their light-harvesting pigment complexes. Research has suggested that engineering plants’ photoprotection capabilities to minimize productivity loss could increase crop yields by up to 30 percent. And that would go a long way toward meeting future global food demand. However, significant gaps remain in scientists’ understanding of the molecular details underlying these mechanisms, including how they are triggered and their activation dynamics. Now, work by Berkeley Lab scientists, reported in pair of recent papers, provides several key insights into the mechanisms underlying one type of photoprotection.

The American Cancer Society bestowed its highest accolade, the Medal of Honor, on Jennifer Doudna, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB), and four others during an October 18 ceremony in Washington, D.C. The medal is awarded to distinguished individuals who have made valuable contributions in the fight against cancer through basic research, clinical research, or public health interventions.

Doudna, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator and professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry at UC Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin were honored for their invention of the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, which has transformed basic cancer research and spawned new cancer therapies currently undergoing trials.

Read more from UC Berkeley News.

Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging senior faculty scientist John Kuriyan has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, which recognizes researchers who have made major contributions to the advancement of medical sciences, health care, and public health.

Kuriyan, who is also a professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley and an HHMI Investigator, has been recognized for his work in understanding eukaryotic cell signaling regulation. Read more at Berkeley News.

Ke Xu, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, has been awarded a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award as part of the National Institutes of Health’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. Supported by the NIH Common Fund, these grants catalyze “exceptionally innovative” biomedical research with “transformative potential” from early career investigators who have never received an NIH grant before. An assistant professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, Xu develops new physical and chemical tools to explore biological, chemical, and materials systems at the nanoscale with extraordinary resolution and sensitivity. He takes a multidimensional approach that integrates advanced microscopy, spectroscopy, cell biology, and nanotechnology. Xu is among 89 New Innovator Award recipients for 2018. Each grant comes with $1.5 million in direct funds for five years.

Read more from UC Berkeley News.

UC Berkeley scientists have discovered that a common diarrhea-causing bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes, produces electricity using an entirely different technique from known electrogenic bacteria—and that hundreds of other bacterial species use this same process. The scientists worked Caroline Ajo-Franklin, a staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry who has a secondary appointment in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, on this research. Read more from the UC Berkeley News Center.