Biosciences News

Lydia Rachbauer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and in the Biosciences Area’s Biological Systems and Engineering Division won first place and a $3,000 prize in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 23, 2021. Rachbauer’s winning three-minute presentation detailed her research on utilizing the microbes found in fish guts to convert seaweed into sustainable biofuels. 

Jay Keasling, a senior faculty scientist in Biological Systems and Engineering, professor at UC Berkeley, and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), has been named a Distinguished Scientist Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Numerous Biosciences Area personnel are among the 2021 Berkeley Lab Director’s Awards honorees. This annual program recognizes outstanding contributions by employees to all facets of Lab activities. A complete list of winners can be found here. The 10th annual Director’s Awards ceremony will take place on November 18 at noon.

The cold polar oceans give rise to some of the largest food webs on Earth. And at their base are microscopic, photosynthetic algae. But human-induced climate change, a new study suggests, is displacing these important cold-water communities of algae with warm-adapted ones, a trend that threatens to destabilize the delicate marine food web and change the oceans as we know them.

The JGI Community Sequencing Program enabled the discovery of these worrisome circumstances for algal communities. Click here to read the news release on the JGI website.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility—the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) conducted a study to identify enzymes that could be genetically manipulated and engineered to speed up the deconstruction process. Using data from EMSL and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the team identified a secretion mutant in the model fungus, Neurospora crassa, and subsequently modified the gene in a different filamentous fungi, Myceliophthora thermophila.