Biosciences News

Eva Nogales, faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division and UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology, led a team that captured freeze-frames of the changing shape of a huge macromolecular complex as it locks onto DNA and loads the machinery for reading the genetic code. The molecule, called transcription factor IID (TFIID), is critical to transcribing genes into messenger RNA that will later be used as blueprints to make proteins.

A team of researchers led by Cheryl Kerfeld, faculty affiliate in the Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, have developed a new method to manipulate miniature factories found in bacteria that could someday lead to new medical, industrial, or energy applications. The factories, called bacterial microcompartments – or BMCs – are found in bacteria all over the world.

Two scientists from the Biosciences Area, Sung-Hou Kim and Susannah Tringe, have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They join fellow Lab scientists Allen Goldsten, faculty scientist in the Energy Technologies Area, and Kathy Yelick, associate laboratory director of Computing Sciences, in receiving the distinction of Fellow this year for “their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.”

On November 15, 2018, at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18) Conference, teams led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), respectively, shared the 2018 ACM Gordon Bell Prize.

Congratulations to JGI’s Chief Informatics Officer Kjiersten Fagnan, who was part of the ORNL-led, seven-member team. The 12-member Berkeley Lab team was recognized for training a deep neural network to identify extreme weather patterns from high-resolution climate simulations using high-performance computers.

Read the full story on the JGI website.

Berkeley Lab researchers, in collaboration with scientists from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute, have demonstrated that fluctuation X-ray scattering is capable of capturing the behavior of biological systems in unprecedented detail. Although this technique was first proposed more than four decades ago, its implementation was hindered by the lack of sufficiently powerful X-ray sources and associated detector technology, sample delivery methods, and the means to analyze the data. The team developed a novel mathematical and data analyses framework that was applied to data obtained from DOE’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC. This breakthrough was recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).