Biosciences News

Anne Villacastin placed first and was also selected as People’s Choice in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 21, 2023. Villacastin, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, detailed her research on sorghum’s potential as a biomanufacturing feedstock. In its sixth … Read more »

Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division Director Susannah Tringe will direct one of two new Berkeley Lab-hosted centers as part of DOE’s Energy Earthshots Initiative. Tringe will lead the center focused on the Carbon Negative shot, dubbed RESTOR-C (Center for Restoration of Soil Carbon By Precision Biological Strategies), which will cultivate ways for plants and microbes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stably store it for more than 100 years in the soil.

Researchers from the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) developed a new framework that reduces the time of developing novel bioproducts. This new workflow, called Product Substrate Pairing (PSP), has already shown great promise for engineering strains that can convert common bacterial food sources into target molecules.

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) are genetic entities that seek to replicate themselves and spread from cell to cell. Two of the most common forms of MGEs are viruses and plasmids. They can be found in virtually all of Earth’s ecosystems. A software tool recently described in Nature Biotechnology called geNomad identifies and classifies MGEs based upon their gene content and their genetic sequences. The software was created by researchers under the direction of JGI Microbiome Data Science Group Lead Nikos Kyrpides.

The ABPDU’s Scale-Up Facilities Expo took place on Aug. 7, 2023, bringing together scale-up facilities and startup researchers. The all-day event saw 249 attendees from 29 countries attend 32 facility presentations, giving them the opportunity to learn about a variety of scale-up capabilities beyond those available at the ABPDU.