Biosciences News

Markita Landry has been named the winner of the 2020 Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award. Landry is a faculty scientist in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB), as well as an assistant professor in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. The award will be presented during the 2020 SciX 2020 conference in October in Sparks, Nevada, where Landry will give a plenary lecture and be honored in a special symposium.

A multi-institutional team including JGI researchers has now sequenced and assembled the genomes of the five major cotton lineages. Senior authors of the paper published April 20, 2020 in Nature Genetics include Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of JGI’s Plant Program, both faculty investigators at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. “The goal has been for all this new cotton work, and even the original cotton project was to try to bring in molecular methods of breeding into cotton,” said Schmutz, who heads JGI’s Plant Program. The high quality reference genomes of all five cotton lineages are available for comparative analysis on JGI’s plant data portal Phytozome 

Go here to read the full story on the JGI website.

On March 31,  a small team of staff at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), which produces beams of X-rays and other types of light to support a wide variety of experiments for researchers around the world, launched several COVID-19-related experiments for other scientists who controlled the work remotely. X-rays allow researchers to map out the 3D structure of proteins relevant to diseases at the scale of molecules and atoms. Structural studies can lead to drugs that target and attack the virus while leaving other vital systems intact, for example, or that can otherwise improve the body’s defenses against the virus.

Jennifer Doudna, faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging Division, has been awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mary Maxon, Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences, announces that a Strategic Programs Development Group (SPDG) has been established in the Biosciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The group will be led by Katy Christiansen, who has been with the Area for six years in a strategic planning and program development capacity.