Biosciences Area

Engineering Living ‘Scaffolds’ for Building Materials

Taking their cue from Nature, Berkeley Lab researchers have engineered living cells to act as a starting point, or “scaffold,” for the self-assembly of composite materials. The resulting engineered living materials (ELMs) represent a new class of material that may open the door to advanced applications in bioelectronics, biosensing, and smart materials.

Leading the effort was Caroline Ajo-Franklin, whose lab is part of the Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, and who holds a secondary appointment in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division. A study describing the work was recently published in ACS Synthetic Biology.

Gut Bacteria’s Shocking Secret: They Produce Electricity

UC Berkeley scientists have discovered that a common diarrhea-causing bacterium, Listeria monocytogenes, produces electricity using an entirely different technique from known electrogenic bacteria—and that hundreds of other bacterial species use this same process. The scientists worked Caroline Ajo-Franklin, a staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry who has a secondary appointment in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, on this research. Read more from the UC Berkeley News Center.

Biosciences and Energy Sciences Areas Host Biomaterials Workshop

On July 16-17, Biosciences, along with the Energy Sciences Area, hosted an internal workshop to discuss and identify paths forward for biomaterials research at Berkeley Lab and in larger contexts–across the national laboratory complex, at universities, and in the private sector– that would enable the creation of new materials with performance-advantaged properties. This workshop continues the program development efforts established through the recent Advanced Biogenic Chemicals and Materials Laboratory-Directed Research and Development initiative established at Berkeley Lab in 2017.

Photos From Women @ The Lab Awards Ceremony

View photos from the July 9 Women @ The Lab awards ceremony, where six Biosciences Area staffers were among the outstanding group of female scientists, engineers, technicians, and operations professionals recognized.

Ultrathin Membrane Both Isolates and Couples Living and Non-Living Catalysts

Biosciences researchers have developed a novel nanoscale membrane embedded with molecular wires that simultaneously chemically isolates, yet electrochemically couples, a microbial and an inorganic catalyst on the shortest possible length scale. This new modular architecture, described in a paper  recently published in Nature Communications, opens up a large design space for building scalable biohybrid electrochemical systems for a variety of applications.

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