MBIB News

In the first trillionths of a second after sunlight hits a photosynthetic organism, the energy that is absorbed flows through a dense network of protein-bound chlorophyll molecules to a dedicated location where it is converted to electric charges. This is the first step in a series of events that ultimately drives the formation of sugar and starch to store energy in chemical bonds.

“This migration is the triggering event that leads to all of the oxygen that we breathe, all of the food that we have, and we really don’t understand why this part of photosynthesis works as well as it does. For every photon of light that’s absorbed, you can expect some biochemical action to occur. That efficiency is really remarkable,” says Naomi Ginsberg, a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division who has a secondary affiliation in Materials Sciences and is also a UC Berkeley associate professor of Chemistry and Physics.

Ginsberg and her colleagues devised a way to measure migration efficiency, and they describe the method in Nature Materials in November 2017.

Ke Xu, faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division, used super-resolution microscopy to reveal the geodesic mesh supporting red blood cells, enabling them to be sturdy yet flexible enough to squeeze through narrow capillaries as they carry oxygen to tissues. The discovery could help uncover how malaria parasites hijack this mesh and destroy red blood cells. Read more at UC Berkeley News.

In two new studies, a team of researchers led by Eva Nogales, senior faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, has gained insight into the structure and function of molecules that act at the genetic level to give rise to different types of cells.

Jennifer Doudna, faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will receive the 2018 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award in Chemical Sciences. According to the NAS award announcement, Doudna is honored for her “pioneering discoveries on how RNA can fold to function in complex ways,” and her invention, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, of “the technology for efficient site-specific genome engineering using the CRISPR/Cas9 nucleases for genome editing — a breakthrough technology which has had an immediate and wide impact on all areas of both basic and applied life sciences.”

For the first time, University of California, Berkeley scientists have used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to disable a defective gene that causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in mice, extending their lifespan by 25 percent. The team was led by David Schaffer, faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging.