Biosciences News

Berkeley Lab scientists have demonstrated for the first time that cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), a Nobel Prize-winning technique originally designed to image proteins in solution, can be adapted to image atomic changes in a synthetic soft material.

As much as 10 percent of the population is thought to have a “rare disease.” Due to a lack of understanding, many of these diseases remain very difficult to diagnose and treat. Inspired by the enormous unmet needs of people with rare diseases, an international team of scientists is developing open-access tools and resources for sharing disease characteristics and treatment information.

Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench is an African grass that adroitly handles droughts, floods and poor soils. While sorghum is drought-tolerant, the crop’s precise response is dependent on when exactly water becomes a limiting factor – before or after flowering. Reported in PNAS the week of December 2, 2019, is the first paper that describes sorghum’s response to drought, from a large-scale field experiment led by a multi-institutional consortium to uncover the mechanisms behind sorghum’s capacity to produce high yields despite drought conditions. Read the full highlight on the JGI website.

Microbiomes play essential roles in the natural processes that keep the planet and our bodies healthy, so it’s not surprising that scientists’ investigations into these diverse microbial communities are leading to advances in medicine, sustainable agriculture, cheap water purification methods, and environmental clean-up technology, just to name a few. However, trying to determine which microbes contribute to an important geochemical or physiological reaction is both incredibly challenging and slow-going, because the task involves analyzing enormous datasets of genetic and metabolic information to match the compounds mediating a process to the microbes that produced them. 

Two scientists from the Biosciences Area, Cheryl Kerfeld and David Schaffer, have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They join fellow Lab scientists Rebecca Abergel in the Chemical Sciences Division, Roland Burgmann and Michael Manga in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Energy Geosciences Division, and Natalie Roe, Director of the Physics Division, in receiving the distinction of Fellow this year for “their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.”