Two members of the Biosciences Area, Eleanor A. Blakely and Krishna K. Niyogi, were among the five Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory-affiliated researchers elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this week. This honor is bestowed for distinguished and continuing achievements in advancing science to serve society.
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Tapping the DNA synthesis expertise of the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a team from the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany has reverse engineered a biosynthetic pathway for more effective carbon fixation. Read more at JGI News.
Plant biologists have bumped up crop productivity by increasing the expression of genes that result in more efficient use of light in photosynthesis, a finding that could be used to help address the world’s future food needs. Scientists in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division at Berkeley Lab, the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the University of Illinois targeted three genes involved in a process plants use to protect themselves from damage when they get more light than they can safely use. By increasing the expression of those genes, the scientists saw increases of 14-20 percent in the productivity of modified tobacco plants in field experiments. MBIB Faculty Scientist Kris Niyogi, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a UC Berkeley professor of plant and microbial biology, teamed up with Stephen Long, a plant biology and crop sciences professor at Illinois, for the Science study. Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center.
Scientists in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division (MBIB) have produced detailed 3-D visualizations that show an unexpected connectivity in the genetic material at the center of cells, providing a new understanding of a cell’s evolving architecture. A team of researchers, led by Carolyn Larabell, MBIB faculty scientist and professor at UCSF, have mapped the reorganization of genetic material that takes place when a stem cell matures into a nerve cell using X-ray imaging tools in the National Center for X-ray Tomography at the Advanced Light Source. The results could help us understand how patterning and reorganization of DNA-containing material called chromatin in a cell’s nucleus relate to a cell’s specialized function as specific genes are activated or silenced. Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center.
The training was targeted at Biosciences Area’s Software Developers
JBEI hosted for a second year a wet lab boot camp targeted at software developers. Following last year’s success, the boot camp returned this time to include 10 software developers from across the Biosciences Area. It included participants from JBEI (Biological Systems & Engineering Division), Agile BioFoundry, DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and Berkeley Lab and Sandia National Lab departments.
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