Biosciences News

The projects of six Physical Biosciences Scientists and Engineers received funding through the FY2015 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. These projects cover a broad range of topics, including energy, biomanufacturing, and technology and tool development. Together, these efforts account for nearly 15% of the $24.9 million allocated. Eighty-two proposals were selected from a field of 169. There was an equal distribution of new and continuing projects among the selected PBD proposals.

Femtosecond crystallography (FX) is especially suitable for studying radiation sensitive enzymes that require metals for their function, as the extremely short and bright X-ray pulses can produce a diffraction image before any atomic motions can occur in the crystal. This cutting edge method is capable of extending our capacity to study smaller, more fragile crystals and determine the catalytic structures of biologically relevant macromolecules.

The Labwide initiative, Microbes-to-Biomes (M2B), has kicked off with five projects funded through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program, and a new website to chronicle news and advancements in M2B’s research mission. The M2B initiative is designed to explore and reveal the interactions of microbes with one another and with their environment – interactions that are vital to the Earth’s future.

When presenting a new idea, formulating an experiment, or communicating research, all researchers build on the body of previously published literature. By citing earlier articles, authors lay the groundwork for their hypotheses, justify their results, and relay their methods using a common language.

The Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) has operated five beamlines at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) for more than ten years, helping hundreds of crystallographers to determine the structures of more than 1,000 proteins. Two of the BCSB’s beamlines (8.2.1 and 8.2.2) are funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to support the cutting edge research of structural biologists, including those in the HHMI research community.