Biosciences News

Two scientists in the Area, Greg Hura and Vivek Mutalik, are heading up research projects that are part of the Department of Energy’s Biopreparedness Research Virtual Environment (BRaVE) initiative. Yasuo Yoshikuni, a scientist at the Joint Genome Institute, is part of a third project that is being led by Brookhaven National Laboratory. These projects will leverage bioimaging expertise to develop better therapies and vaccines for viruses, develop a high-throughput platform to rapidly design countermeasures to drug-resistant pathogens, and unlock the molecular basis of plant-pathogen interactions to create resilient bioenergy crops.

The Agile BioFoundry (ABF), supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), announced the selection of five external collaborations totaling over $3 million to conduct research and development needed to accelerate the U.S. biomanufacturing sector. 

The awardees will collaborate with scientists from the ABF consortium, leveraging DOE national laboratory capabilities to address challenges in biomanufacturing.

To provide broad plant genomic capabilities, the DOE Joint Genome Institute works in partnership with the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, which specializes in genome improvement for plants. As part of that partnership, the JGI and HudsonAlpha researchers led a team that recently published work on the JGI Plant Gene Atlas in Nucleic Acids Research. Learn more on the JGI website.

Researchers have leveraged machine learning to create proteins that toggle between two different shapes in response to biological triggers, overcoming a limiting challenge in computational protein design and broadening the potential functionality of designed proteins. Study co-author Banumathi Sankaran, a research scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Bioimaging Division, used the Advanced Light Source (ALS) beamlines in the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) to validate results with X-ray crystallography data. 

To help accelerate innovation and develop new biomanufacturing approaches, three new projects were selected for funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). 

Through the funding opportunity titled, “Accelerating Innovations in Biomanufacturing Approaches through Collaboration Between NSF and the DOE BETO-funded Agile BioFoundry (ABF), researchers will collaborate with the ABF consortium’s synthetic and bioengineering research projects.