Biosciences News

Several Biosciences Area personnel have been named as recipients of 2016 Berkeley Lab Director’s Awards. Yan Liang (Biological Systems & Engineering), Eva Nogales, and William Jagust (Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging, MBIB) were honored with individual awards in Early Career, Scientific Achievement, and Societal Impact, respectively. Jill Fuss and Steven Yannone (MBIB) were the recipients of a team award in Technology Transfer for the launch of their company CinderBio. Jim Bristow (Biosciences Area Office, Trent Northen (Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology & Joint Genome Institute, JGI), and Susannah Tringe (JGI), along with Eoin Brodie and Peter Nico of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, were named in a team award in Service.

An all-day workshop highlighting the Berkeley Lab’s capabilities in electron microscopy was held on Tuesday, October 11. Organized by Paul Adams (Biosciences Area), Peter Denes (Advanced Light Source) and Andy Minor (National Center for Electron Microscopy), the workshop highlighted recent advances in imaging a broad range of materials and biological samples at atomic, or near-atomic scales. In addition, it made evident the many opportunities that could come from integrating capabilities across the Laboratory. Paul Adams, Director of the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, noted that the recent revolution in electron microscopy for biosciences has opened up many new avenues of research and exciting synergies with non-biosciences programs at the Lab. Read more in Glenn Roberts’ Science Short on the Berkeley Lab News Center.

For the first time, a new tool developed at Berkeley Lab allows researchers to interactively explore the hierarchical processes that happen in the brain when it is resting or performing tasks. Scientists also hope that the tool can shed some light on how neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s spread throughout the brain.

The software, called Brain Modulyzer, was created by researchers in the Computational Research Division and Kris Bouchard from the Biological Systems & Engineering Division in conjunction with computer scientists at University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and with input from neuroscientists at UC San Francisco (UCSF). The software combines multiple coordinated views of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data—like heat maps, node link diagrams and anatomical views—to provide context for brain connectivity data. For more, read the press release by Linda Vu at the Berkeley Lab News Center.

On October 1, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) established the Agile BioFoundry (ABF)—a new consortium of nine Energy Department national laboratories working to standardize and streamline the entire biomanufacturing pipeline by uniting computer-assisted biological pathway design, process integration, process scale-up, and machine learning. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is leading the consortium, which will achieve its goals by developing a system for product development and commercialization that will be broadly applicable to many bioproducts. BSE’s Computational Staff Scientist Nathan Hillson is heading up Berkeley Lab’s efforts, joined by task managers Blake Simmons and Todd Pray. For more information about the Agile BioFoundry, read this BETO blog post.

Researchers have shown that when parts of a genome known as enhancers are missing, the heart works abnormally, a finding that bolsters the importance of DNA segments once considered “junk” because they do not code for specific proteins. The study, led by Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology (EGSB) Division scientists Diane Dickel, Axel Visel and Len Pennacchio, appears in the journal Nature Communications. The team included other members of EGSB’s Mammalian Functional Genomics Laboratory and collaborators from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and UC San Diego.