Biosciences Area

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.

JBEI’s Pamela Ronald Named GCHERA World Agriculture Prize Laureate

Pamela Ronald, the  Joint BioEnergy Institute’s (JBEI) Scientific Lead for Plant Pathology in the Feedstocks division, has been named the 2020 World Agriculture Prize laureate by the Global Confederation of Higher Education Associations for Agricultural and Life Sciences, or GCHERA. Ronald is a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis (one of JBEI’s six academic research partners) and with the UC Davis  Genome Center. She becomes the first woman whose work is recognized by the award.  The virtual award ceremony will be held on November 30.

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