Biosciences News

Faculty biochemist Jennifer Doudna recently sat down with Maria Sterrett, a Genetics Society of America (GSA) member, for the Genes to Genomes blog series, “Behind the Podium.” The UC Berkeley professor and HHMI investigator is now famous for her contribution to the development of the CRISPR/Cas9 system for genome editing and will be one of the keynote speakers at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), set to take place in Orlando this July. In the interview, Doudna stressed the pivotal role played in the scientific community by societies like GSA, saying how important it is “to foster a great community of scientists to exchange ideas.” She also observed that societies encourage younger scientists to get involved in the field and introduce them to the cutting edge advances of their field. Read her interview in Genes to Genomes.

Antioch High School juniors practiced their job application skills on February 26 during mock interviews held at LBL’s Biosciences Emery Station Operations Center (ESOC). The students, who are taking part in the Biotech Partners program, are getting ready for their interviews in order to get summer internships. The ESOC operations staff was on hand to … Read more »

Ke Xu (left) and Wenjun Zhang (right) of the Biosciences Area have been named Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellows. Xu is a faculty chemist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division and Zhang is a faculty biologist in the Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division. These scientists are two of the eight UC Berkeley assistant professors to be honored by the Foundation, along with 118 other new fellows announced today. Fellowships are awarded in eight scientific and technical fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics. Read more at Berkeley News.

Aymerick Eudes and Dominique Loqué of the Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI) led a study that shows for the first time that an enzyme can be tweaked to reduce lignin in plants. Their technique could help lower the cost of converting biomass into carbon-neutral fuels to power your car and other sustainably developed bio-products. The crystal structure of this enzyme was solved using data collected in the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology at the Advanced Light Source. Read more on the Berkeley Lab News Center.

“Nature has engineered these fungi to have what seems to be the world’s largest repertoire of enzymes that break down biomass.”

Published online February 18, 2016, in Science, a team from UC Santa Barbara drew upon two U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (SC) User Facilities: the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the DOE Joint Genome Institute to show that anaerobic fungi found in the guts of goats, horses and sheep are just as capable of breaking down plant biomass as are industry-developed fungi, potentially leading to cheaper biofuels and bio-based products. The team’s study is the first to result from a partnership between the two national user facilities called Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science or FICUS. The partnership allows scientists around the world to draw on capabilities at both SC user facilities to get a more complete understanding of fundamental scientific questions. Read more about the FICUS project on the JGI website.