MBIB News

Over the course of billions of years, nature has evolved particular molecular structures that form the basis of life, such as those found in nucleic acids and proteins. Using the natural form as a springboard, University of Washington researchers have designed protein homo-oligomers, or identical interacting subunits, which can contain interchangeable hydrogen bonding modules for building different structures or functions. The team of researchers, led by David Baker at the University of Washington, included Jose Henrique Pereira, Banumathi Sankaran, and Peter Zwart of the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division (MBIB).

Karen Davies, staff scientist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, and Jenny Mortimer, Director of Plant Systems Biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, are two of 50 extraordinary scientists under the age of 40 who have been selected to participate alongside business and political leaders in the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, which is taking place from June 26-28 in Tianjin, China.

What if checking the state of your arterial health were as simple as monitoring your blood pressure? New technology developed by Jonathan Maltz, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging division, could make this a reality. Maltz came up with the idea of using sensors to detect the changes in the pulse pressure as blood flows through the brachial artery, a major vessel in the upper arm. Previous studies have shown a strong correlation between the health of brachial and coronary arteries. With initial funding from a Berkeley Lab Innovation Grant, Maltz developed an advanced prototype called the Engevity Cuff, which looks and feels much like a blood pressure monitor. He worked with UC San Francisco (UCSF) chief cardiologist Jeffrey Olgin and his team, who are conducting a major heart health study, to test the device on real patients. Last fall, startup company Lexington Biosciences licensed the technology to help further refine the device and bring it to the medical market.

Working at temperatures near absolute zero, scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have captured images of proteins at work in the early steps of DNA transcription. Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist at in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, UC Berkeley professor of biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, led the new study, published today in the journal Nature.

This latest research comes seven weeks after Nogales unveiled an earlier milestone using cryo-EM technology to image details of transcription factor TFIID in gene expression. Read the full UC Berkeley press release on the newest Nature paper.

Graham R. Fleming, senior scientist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, has won the Royal Chemistry Society’s Faraday Lectureship Prize 2016. The prize was awarded for experimental and theoretical achievements that have redefined the study and understanding of fundamental chemical and photobiological processes in liquids, solutions and proteins. A particular emphasis in Fleming’s research is photosynthetic light harvesting and its regulation via nonphotochemical quenching.