Biosciences News

On January 23, 2020, Berkeley Lab hosted a workshop on opportunities afforded by single-cell technologies for energy and environmental science, as well as conceptual and technological grand challenges that must be tackled to apply these powerful approaches to plants, fungi and algae. This event, which was spearheaded by Diane Dickel in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, brought together a diverse group of leaders in functional genomics technologies from academia, the National Laboratories, and local research institutions.

Biochemist Jennifer Doudna, a professor at UC Berkeley and faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division, has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “the development of a method for genome editing.” She shares the Nobel Prize with co-discoverer Emmanuelle Charpentier, who currently serves as the scientific and managing director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. In 2012, Doudna and Charpentier’s research team detailed the underlying mechanisms of the CRISPR-Cas9 system – a component of the bacterial immune system that defends against invading viruses – and explained how it can be programmed to cut DNA at a target sequence.

Innumerable road trips to collect hundreds of weedy green millet (Setaria viridis) plants have resulted in a Nature Biotechnology paper from researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, the Danforth Center and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. The team generated genome sequences for nearly 600 green millet plants and released a very high quality reference S. viridis genome sequence. Analysis of these plant genome sequences also led researchers to identify a gene related to seed dispersal in wild populations for the first time. Learn more here on the JGI website

Researchers at Berkeley Lab have transformed lignin, a waste product of the paper industry, into a precursor for a useful chemical with a wide range of potential applications. The work was a collaboration between the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and the Queens University of Charlotte. In a recent study, they demonstrated their ability to convert lignin into a chemical compound that is a building block of bio-based ionic liquids.

Scientists at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) are using synthetic biology to give plants the ability to create molecules never seen before in nature. New research led by Patrick Shih, director of Plant Biosystems Design at JBEI, and Beth Sattely of Stanford University describes success in swapping enzymes between plants to engineer new synthetic metabolic pathways. These pathways gave plants the ability to create new classes of chemical compounds, some of which have enhanced properties.