Biosciences News

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee discussed the work of Biosciences’ Mina Bissell in a feature on worldwide research efforts to understand the factors that determine whether cancer will spread.  Bissell, a distinguished scientist in the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division, has shown that a cancer cell’s local tissue environment affects whether or not it will form a metastatic tumor. The article appeared in the Sept. 11 edition of The New Yorker.

The Biosciences Area has launched a new LinkedIn page. This platform will support the dissemination of the Area’s news and opportunities to a wider audience. LinkedIn offers exciting features that the Biosciences communications team will be further exploring in the future. To get updates via LinkedIn please make sure to click the “follow” button.

You can also stay up to date with the latest news from the Area’s Divisions and User Facility by following the Biosciences Twitter account.

Among the 30 proposals selected for the 2018 Community Science Program (CSP) of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) is one by Jillian Banfield, a UC Berkeley professor and Berkeley Lab faculty scientist affiliated with the Environmental Genomics & System Biology (EGSB) Division. Banfield will study the impact of soil microbial communities along the East River in Colorado on the quality of water leaving the watershed. The research is part of a major DOE project to investigate how terrestrial systems respond to perturbations such as droughts, floods, and early snowmelt. The full list of accepted proposals can be viewed here.

Carolyn Larabell, a professor at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine and a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division at Berkeley Lab, has been selected by the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Users’ Executive Committee to receive the 2017 David A. Shirley Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement. Larabell directs the National Center for X-Ray Tomography (NCXT) centered around ALS Beamline 2.1, the world’s first soft x-ray microscope for biological imaging, and she led the group responsible for its commissioning, design, and construction. Soft x-ray tomography makes it possible to image intact biological cells in 3-D without structure-damaging preparation such as chemically fixing, dehydrating, and staining the specimens. On October 3, Larabell will give her award talk, entitled “The Expanding Universe of Cell Biology at the NCXT,” during the ALS User Meeting at Berkeley Lab. Read more in ALS News & Updates.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign research initiative on which Biosciences’ Krishna Niyogi has been a longtime collaborator received a $45 million, five-year reinvestment to continue efforts to re-engineer photosynthesis in staple crops order to sustainably increase yields worldwide. The new round of funding for Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, and the U.K. Department for International Development. Niyogi, a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrative Bioimaging (MBIB) and chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley, has been involved with RIPE since its inception. His research related to the project focuses on relaxing the protective mechanisms plants have developed to avoid damage to leaves from high-intensity light. Read more from UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources.