Biosciences News

Jay Keasling, a senior faculty scientist in Biological Systems and Engineering, professor at UC Berkeley, and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), has been named a Distinguished Scientist Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Numerous Biosciences Area personnel are among the 2021 Berkeley Lab Director’s Awards honorees. This annual program recognizes outstanding contributions by employees to all facets of Lab activities. A complete list of winners can be found here. The 10th annual Director’s Awards ceremony will take place on November 18 at noon.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility—the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) conducted a study to identify enzymes that could be genetically manipulated and engineered to speed up the deconstruction process. Using data from EMSL and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the team identified a secretion mutant in the model fungus, Neurospora crassa, and subsequently modified the gene in a different filamentous fungi, Myceliophthora thermophila.

The Vilcek Foundation has honored Markita Landry, faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging with the 2022 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. Landry’s work centers on understanding aberrations in neurotransmitter signaling—a fundamental component in psychiatric disorders such as depression, and schizophrenia, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer disease. She has also led work that has elucidated transport phenomena in plants, which has applications in agricultural biotechnology with regard to the development of food and medicine.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of space-time, explains a multitude of gravitational phenomena, but that theory falls apart within the tiniest of volumes.

Researchers at Berkeley Lab and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed an experiment that may settle the persistent question: Is gravity truly a quantum force? They recently described their work in the journal Physical Review X Quantum.