Biosciences News

The Department of Energy’s Joint Bioenergy Institute (JBEI) Chief Executive Officer, Jay Keasling, has announced that Aindrila Mukhopadhyay will step into the role of Vice President of the Fuels Synthesis Division. This announcement comes after a national search and interview process. Mukhopadhyay, who joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in 2003, will continue to serve as Director of JBEI’s Host Engineering group and as Interim Division Director of Berkeley Lab’s Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) in the Biosciences Area.

The Biosciences Area launched a new Twitter account today. The social media platform will serve as a support tool to the Biosciences Area’s broader communications strategy.  Expect to see news and latest achievements from the Area’s Divisions and User Facility: Biological Systems and Engineering, Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology, Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, and DOE’s Joint Genome Institute. Follow @LBNLBioSci.

In his blog late last week, NIH Director Francis S. Collins highlighted Cryo-EM Microscopy, the Method of the Year 2015. Collins gave a retrospective analysis of how far the method has come over the past decade, and credits most of the advances to improvements in the technology available, particularly computational methods for image construction and direct electron detectors that can fix the blurring problem caused by molecules moving around in the electron beam. With these and other changes, the number of structures determined using this method have increased substantially in just the past year. Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging’s Robert Glaeser got a shout-out for his Nature Methods commentary, which says that owing to the laws of physics, we can expect more good things.

Graham Fleming, chemist senior faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging, led the creation of the first computational model that simulates the light-harvesting activity of the thousands of antenna proteins that would be interacting in the chloroplast of an actual leaf. The results from this model point the way to improving the yields of food and fuel crops, and developing artificial photosynthesis technologies. Read more at Berkeley Lab News Center.

JBEI researchers Seema Singh and Blake Simmons of the Biological Systems and Engineering Division led the development of a “high-gravity” one-pot process for producing ethanol from cellulosic biomass that gives unprecedented yields while minimizing water use and waste disposal. “High gravity” means high biomass loading – the higher the biomass loading, the lower the costs for converting it to fuels. Read more at Berkeley Lab News Center.