MBIB News

Chemistry Nobelist Eric Betzig and world-class biophysicist Na Ji will join Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley in the summer of 2017. They will serve as faculty scientists in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division of the Biosciences Area.

Eva Nogales, a faculty structural biologist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, has been named 2016 Porter Lecturer by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The lecture is named in memory of Keith R. Porter, a pioneer in the use of electron microscopy in biology and one of the founders of ASCB, and is bestowed upon an eminent cell biologist each year at the ASCB Annual Meeting. Nogales will present the lecture on December 4 at ASCB 2016 in San Francisco, which will focus on the latest discoveries in the field, including CRISPR, and on building links from fundamental research to clinical issues.

In celebration of Nogales and Mina Bissell, a distinguished scientist in the Biological Systems & Engineering Division and awardee of the society’s 2016 E.B. Wilson Medal, the ASCB will host a dinner at the annual meeting in honor of these two accomplished Biosciences researchers.

MBIB researchers were part of a team that used SLAC’s X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) – the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility – to get atomic views of the toxin BinAB, used as a larvicide to control mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, West Nile virus and viral encephalitis. The structure of this bacterial toxin was solved using de novo phasing: the protein crystals were tagged with heavy metal markers, tens of thousands of diffraction patterns were collected using the XFEL, and the information was combined to obtain a three-dimensional map of the electron density of the protein. The Berkeley team, headed by Senior Scientist Nicholas Sauter, acquired and processed data for the study, published in Nature last week.

Excess light energy that a plant can’t absorb needs to be dissipated to avoid damage and oxidative stress. Krishna Niyogi, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrative Bioimaging and a UC Berkeley professor of plant and microbial biology, led the study that included researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and Colorado State University at Fort Collins. The scientists are studying ways to increase the amount of light that can be safely absorbed, potentially leading to more efficient photosynthesis and higher crop productivity. Read the Berkeley Lab Science Short.

In their Nano Letters paper released August 23, 2016, a research team led by Danielle Tullman-Ercek, biologist faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, described a new size selection method for virus-like particle assembly using chromatography. Their work has important implications for virus evolution theory, multi-protein assembly behavior, and protein-based nanomaterial development.