Biosciences News

The Agile BioFoundry selected new collaborations from its joint funding opportunity with the National Science Foundation. The selected projects all directly contribute to the production of renewable biochemicals and biofuels and build foundational technologies critical for the decarbonization of the industrial and transportation sectors.

Within a forest’s soil, a microbiome of bacteria, viruses and fungi process carbon and nitrogen, paving the way for future plants and trees to grow. However, fire changes the microbes within the soil. Recently, JGI collaborators worked to understand which microbes in the soil persist after a wildfire — and why they thrive. Their results appear in Nature Microbiology.

A Berkeley Lab team developed a novel software architecture called Neurodata Without Borders (NWB) to serve as a standardized language for neurophysiology data and data-descriptors. The resulting data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), and enables neuroscientists to effectively describe and communicate about their experiments and share data.

Genentech researchers used a suite of methods, including small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) to learn how an assembly of three proteins works together to transmit signals for cell division. The work reveals new targets for the development of drugs that fight certain types of cancer, including lung, colorectal, and pancreatic.

Aparajitha Srinivasan placed third and Ying Wang was awarded People’s Choice in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 22. Srinivasan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division, detailed her research on utilizing computational modeling to select the best routes to creating aroma additives. The Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division’s Wang covered how to determine which microbes eat which carbon molecules.