Biosciences News

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) announced the selection of three external collaborations totaling $1 million to conduct research and development needed to accelerate the U.S. biomanufacturing sector. Investigators at minority serving institutions (MSI) will receive funding to conduct research at their parent institutions. This research will support the advancement of their technologies and position awardees to more fully leverage the BETO-funded Agile BioFoundry (ABF) consortium’s technical capabilities in future projects.

To do anything, viruses must find a host, and not just any host will do. It must be a specific host the virus has adapted to commandeer. For bacteriophage viruses, these hosts are microbes like bacteria, not humans. With metagenomic sequencing, researchers have found more of these viruses than ever before, in all kinds of ecosystems. However, matching these viral genetic sequences to their hosts is crucial to understanding what these viruses can do.

Building on existing virus-host prediction approaches, researchers have created a new program called iPHoP (pronounced “eye-pop”, freely available online).

A new study investigating the effect of thirdhand smoke (THS) in a mouse model system specially designed to mimic the genetic diversity of human populations has shed new light on how genetic predispositions contribute to an individual’s cancer risk.

As a young man, Kenneth Sauer joined Berkeley Lab four years after arriving in Berkeley for his postdoctoral position with famed chemist Melvin Calvin. By that time, he had accepted an assistant professorship in UC Berkeley’s Department of Chemistry to continue what would be his life’s scientific work on the intricate physical process of photosynthesis. He remained active for over 50 years and was, most recently, a professor emeritus of chemistry at UC Berkeley. Sauer died at the age of 91 following a brief illness on November 6, 2022.

Biophysicist Eva Nogales, a senior faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division, is a 2023 recipient of the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine. Nogales, who is also a UC Berkeley distinguished professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology, shares the prize with Patrick Cramer of the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Germany. The pair were honored for pioneering structural biology techniques that enabled visualization of the protein machines responsible for gene transcription at the level of individual atoms.