Berkeley Lab and Colorado School of Mines scientists are collaborating on the development of a microbe-based system that could remove toxic compounds from wastewater produced by the oil and gas industries so it can be reused in other water-intensive sectors such as agriculture and energy production. Leading the Berkeley Lab half of the partnership are … Read more »
Jay Keasling, JBEI’s Chief Executive Officer, was featured in NHK World’s interview program “Direct Talk”. Keasling, a pioneer of synthetic biology, talks about the impact that this interdisciplinary technology can have in people’s lives as well as addresses its safety concerns.
Direct Talk is a program that interviews leaders, visionaries and pioneers who shape the world and is broadcast to 300-million households in 160 countries in six different language subtitles.
A group of geneticists from Berkeley Lab, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley are unraveling new details about human evolution by studying the uniquely regulated portion of our chromosomes that surround the centromeres. These stretches of DNA – termed centromere-proximal regions (CPRs) – are largely composed of highly repetitive, mostly non-gene-coding sequences that … Read more »
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Inoviruses are filamentous viruses with small, single-stranded DNA genomes and a unique chronic infection cycle. In Nature Microbiology, a team led by DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) researchers applied machine learning to publicly available microbial genomes and metagenomes to search for inoviruses. The search tool combed through more than 70,000 microbial and metagenome datasets, ultimately identifying more than 10,000 inovirus-like sequences compared to the 56 previously known inovirus genomes. The results revealed inoviruses are in every major microbial habitat—including soil, water, and humans—around the world.
“We’re not sure why we systematically manage to miss them; maybe it’s due to the way we currently isolate and extract viruses,” said the study’s lead author Simon Roux, a JGI research scientist in the Environmental Genomics group. Click here to read the full story on the JGI site.
In an opinion piece published July 19 in ACS Synthetic Biology, Hector Garcia Martin and Tijana Radivojevic of the Biosciences Area’s Biological Systems & Engineering Division collaborated with Pablo Carbonell of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology’s SynBioChem Centre, to highlight the opportunities in a radical new approach to bioengineering that leverages the latest disruptive advances in machine learning.
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