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.
The Green Secrets of Goat Poop
Microbes found in the goat gut microbiome could help humans convert plant material into valuable, eco-friendly commodities
Converting the tough fibers and complex sugars in plants into biofuels and other products could be humanity’s ticket to smarter materials, better medicines, and a petroleum-free, sustainable future. But harnessing the chemical commodities stored in these molecules is no simple task. We may take it for granted because our bodies seem to do it automatically, but in reality, every time we eat a vegetable or leafy green, the microbial communities living inside of us are performing an elaborate disassembly line of coordinated chemical reactions to break the plant matter into simple sugars that human cells can use.
JGI, JBEI Part of Switchgrass Reference Genome Effort
In Nature, a team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and DOE Joint Genome Institute has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome. Building off this work, researchers at all four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers—the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, the Center for … Read more »
Get a Move On: Protein Translates Chemistry into Motion
The protein CheY plays a role in relaying sensory signals from chemoreceptors to the rotary motor at the base of the tail-like appendage, or flagellum, that protrudes from the cell body of certain bacteria and eukaryotic cells. It has been studied as a model for dissecting the mechanism of allostery—the process by which the binding of biological macromolecules (mainly proteins) at one location regulates activity at another, often distant, functional site. When it is transiently phosphorylated in response to chemotactic cues, CheY’s binding affinity for a flagellar motor switch protein called FliM is enhanced. CheY binding to FliM changes the direction of flagellar rotation from counterclockwise to clockwise.
Using X-ray footprinting with mass spectroscopy (XFMS), a team led by Shahid Khan, a senior scientist with the Molecular Biology Consortium, established that CheY changes shape when it tethers to the motor, and further parsed the contribution of phosphorylation to this shape change. The results of the XFMS experiments validated atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) predictions of the architecture of the allosteric communication network, marking the first time that XFMS has been used to validate protein dynamics simulations at single-residue resolution sampled over the complete protein.
Microbe “Rewiring” Technique Promises a Boom in Biomanufacturing
A new approach to modifying microbes’ metabolic processes will speed up production of innovative bio-based fuels, materials, and chemicals
Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have achieved unprecedented success in modifying a microbe to efficiently produce a compound of interest using a computational model and CRISPR-based gene editing.
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