The projects of 14 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY20 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The funded projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including: developing closed-loop plastics from biogenic feedstocks; reimagining a root system optimized for plant-microbe interactions; and creating computational tools for extracting macromolecular conformational dynamics. Lab-wide, 96 projects were selected from a field of 168 proposals. Biosciences Area efforts account for 18.5 percent of the $23 million allocated.
Banfield Team Studies Huge Bacteria-eating Viruses
Jill Banfield, an Earth and Environmental Sciences Area faculty scientist with a secondary appointment in the Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology Division, co-led a team to discover 351 different huge bacteria-eating phages. One of these is the largest bacteriophage known to date–with a genome that at 735,000 pairs long–is nearly 15 times longer than the average phage.
Q&A: What Rare Diseases Are and Why That Matters
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.
Two from Biosciences Named AAAS Fellows
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.”
Perfectly Raw or Cooked to Perfection? How Food Preparation Affects the Microbiome
The gut microbiome undergoes rapid and dramatic changes in species composition and gene expression when the host switches between eating cooked or raw vegetables, according to a team of scientists led by UC San Francisco and Harvard University. Their new study, published in Nature Microbiology, is the first to investigate how this aspect of diet affects the microbiome, and included experiments in both mice and humans.
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