The projects of 13 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY17 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The funded projects cover a broad range of topics including the study of microbiomes in relation to their environment, plants, and gut health; catalysis for solar conversion to energy; and genomic expression in tissue. Among them were three projects related to Lab-wide initiatives. Together, these efforts account for 17.5% of the $25.2 million allocated. Lab-wide, a total of 88 projects were selected from a field of 166 proposals.
Berkeley Lab Gets $4.6M in Functional Genomics Catalog Project
The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is set to receive close to $4.6 million over four years as part of an ongoing federally funded project to create a comprehensive catalog for fundamental genomics research. This work will be part of the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Encyclopedia of DNA Elements ENCODE project.
The new Berkeley Lab grant, awarded at more than $1.1 million per year, will be used to establish the Center for In Vivo Characterization of ENCODE Elements (CIViC). It will be one of five characterization centers tasked with investigating how genomic elements function in vivo. CIViC will be led by principal investigators Len Pennacchio and Axel Visel, senior scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division. Research scientist Diane Dickel will be the center’s project manager. Read more in the Berkeley Lab News Center.
For Normal Heart Function, Look Beyond the Genes
Researchers have shown that when parts of a genome known as enhancers are missing, the heart works abnormally, a finding that bolsters the importance of DNA segments once considered “junk” because they do not code for specific proteins. The study, led by Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology (EGSB) Division scientists Diane Dickel, Axel Visel and Len Pennacchio, appears in the journal Nature Communications. The team included other members of EGSB’s Mammalian Functional Genomics Laboratory and collaborators from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and UC San Diego.
Division Leadership Team Changes in EGSB and BSE
The Biosciences Area is pleased to announce that Adam Deutschbauer and Diane Dickel have agreed to take on new leadership positions in the Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology (EGSB) Division. Deutschbauer, previously the department head of Functional Genomics, is rising to the position of EGSB co-deputy for science, and Dickel will assume the role of … Read more »
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