Biosciences News

The biopolymer has far-reaching potential from medical therapeutics to replacing synthetic plastics. Armed with a deep understanding of how the enzymes makes acholetin, scientists now have a target for preventing bacterial contamination and the means to produce acholetin for a variety of purposes.

Continuing explorations into a remote hot spring, deep within the British Columbia backcountry, researchers from the University of Calgary and the JGI employed single-cell sequencing to assess the diversity within and between microbial populations. The work, published in The ISME Journal, showed the value of conducting large-scale single cell genomics by collecting nearly 500 single cells from a single low diversity hot spring sediment sample. Their work showed that single cell genomics can add significant value to the other commonly used culture-independent sequencing approaches including amplicon and metagenomic sequencing. Learn more here on the JGI website.

Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego used the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology’s 8.2.2 beamline at the Advanced Light Source to identify structural details of an enzyme that produces a versatile anti-cancer molecule. By virtue of the its unique, ringed structure the molecule crosses the blood-brain barrier and could be instrumental in fighting difficult-to-access brain cancers.

Viruses have evolved a wide variety of ways to exploit parts of their host cells to avoid detection and to grow. Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute and the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology are learning more about how hepatitis C works to deceive its host cells.

A team of researchers from the Biosciences Area at Berkeley Lab and the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom found one particular organism in the fly’s microbiome that helps protect it from atrazine, an herbicide toxic to flies that is commonly used in agriculture. This method of rescuing fruit flies from atrazine poisoning with probiotics may be useful for protecting pollinators in agriculture.