For structural biologists who study proteins, predicting their shape offers a key to understanding their function and accelerating treatments for diseases like cancer and COVID-19. The current approaches to accurately mapping that shape have their limitations, but by applying powerful machine learning methods to the large library of protein structures it is now possible to predict a protein’s shape from its gene sequence.
ABPDU Celebrates a Decade of Bio-Innovation
Ten years ago, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced the opening of a brand new, 15,000-square-foot facility full of stainless steel state-of-the-art bioprocessing equipment – what we now know as the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit, or ABPDU, was officially open for business.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bioenergy Technologies Office, ABPDU set out to provide a boost to the development of advanced biofuels – renewable fuels that produce at least 50% less greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels. ABPDU’s facility would serve as an industry-scale proving ground for biofuel discoveries made at lab bench-scale.
One-of-a-Kind Course Aims to Build the Bioeconomy Workforce
A new course at the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU) prepares UC Berkeley students for careers in biotech by giving them much-needed experience with bioprocessing equipment.
Mary Maxon Writes About Bioengineering for the Future
Mary Maxon, Associate Lab Director for Biosciences, co-wrote the cover story for the March/April 2021 edition of The Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI) policy magazine, The Environmental Forum. Maxon and her co-author, David Rejeski, a visiting scholar at ELI, discussed everything related to the bioeconomy: economic activity that is driven by research and innovation in the life sciences and biotechnology, and that is enabled by technological advances in engineering and in computing and information sciences.
Video Chosen for Global Bioeconomy Summit 2020
The Biosciences Area coordinated the production of a video, “Supporting the US Bioeconomy: The Role of the DOE National Laboratories,” which was the only video submitted from the United States for inclusion in the Global Bioeconomy Summit 2020.
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