Biosciences News

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Sandia National Laboratories working at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have resolved the protein structure of the enzyme LigM, which is utilized by the soil bacterium Sphingomonas to metabolize aryl compounds derived from lignin, the stiff, organic material that gives plants their structure. Their work is reported in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more in the Berkeley Lab News Center.

Joint Genome Institute and Duke University researchers utilized a relative of the model plant Arabidopsis to provide the first direct evidence that QTLs, genome regions on chromosomes to which genetic traits can be mapped, are a driving force behind speciation. This research appeared in in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Read the JGI Science Highlight.

The 2016 Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) publication “End-to-end automated microfluidic platform for synthetic biology: from design to functional analysis” has been selected as the Journal of Biological Engineering Publication of the Year. Gregory Linshiz, former post-doctoral researcher and Director of Synthetic Biology Informatics Nathan Hillson conceived the project that served as the basis of this research. In the paper the authors present a programmable, multipurpose microfluidic platform and associated software and apply the platform to major steps of the synthetic biology research cycle: design, construction, testing, and analysis. The formal announcement of the award will be made at this year’s Annual Meeting of Institute of Biological Engineering (March 30 – April 1, in Salt Lake City, UT).

With help from the Joint Genome Institute, a Stanford University team used a genetic screen to identify a mutant in the model grass Brachypodium distachyon that affects stomatal morphology and, by extension, how plants manage water. Read the JGI Science Highlight.

Mina J. Bissell, Distinguished Scientist in the Biological Systems and Engineering Division will be awarded the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research at the annual meeting on April 1. The Award was first established in 2004 to honor individuals who have made significant fundamental contributions to cancer research, either through a single scientific discovery or a collective body of work. The AACR honors Bissell for her pioneering work, which has identified the roles of the extracellular matrix and three-dimensional architecture in programs of gene expression in tissue morphogenesis and cancer. Her research contributions are widely recognized for launching the tumor microenvironment field and for revolutionizing cell and cancer biologists’ perspective on the dominant forces in cancer.