Several Berkeley Lab scientists will present talks at the 72nd annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society, to be held February 15 through 19 in Austin, Texas. Among them are four representing the Biosciences Area: Mary Maxon, Blake Simmons, Trent Northen, and Susannah Tringe.
Crystallization Screen Created by Berkeley Lab Biosciences Scientists Reaches the Market
X-ray crystallography has been the most successful technique used to solve macromolecular structures, contributing several thousand new entries to the Protein Data Bank (PDB) every year. The protein crystal is the critical starting point for X-ray data collection, and consequently, its properties are correlated with the quality of the data and the level of detail that can be extracted for a macromolecular structure. However, proteins require solutions of specific composition to form crystals for structure determination studies. These specifications are usually determined from exposing the protein to several different solutions in a crystallization screen.
A team of researchers in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division led by Paul Adams and Jose Henrique Pereira have developed a new crystal screen, the Berkeley Screen, with 96 conditions proven to be highly effective at producing crystals for structural determination. The Berkeley Screen is now available to the wider crystallography community commercially.
JGI, JBEI Present First Results of Genus-Wide Aspergillus Project
Found in microbial communities around the world, Aspergillus fungi are pathogens, decomposers, and important sources of biotechnologically-important enzymes. In a study published ahead the week of January 8, 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), and the DOE’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) report the first results of a long-term plan to sequence, annotate and analyze the genomes of 300 Aspergillus fungi. These findings are a proof of concept of novel methods to functionally annotate genomes in order to more quickly identify genes of interest. Read more on the JGI website.
JBEI and JGI Partner with LanzaTech in New DOE Technology Commercialization Fund Grant
LanzaTech is looking into new routes to capture carbon capture and biomanufacture new products. In order to accelerate development while at the same time reducing costs and increasing throughput, LanzaTech is partnering with Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories: Berkeley Lab (LBNL); DOE Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI); Sandia National Laboratories (SNL); the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and Oak Ridge National Lab to develop new foundational technologies that will open new frontiers in this space. Under a Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) grant by the DOE, LanzaTech, with LBNL, SNL and JBEI will focus on microfluidics, as a way to shrink the physical footprint of LanzaTech’s manufacturing facility, and reducing the cost and time needed to test the outcome of each experiment. DOE JGI will synthesize 1 million base pairs of DNA for novel pathways and to construct a library for modification of every gene in LanzaTech’s organism. Read the press release.
To Find New Biofuel Enzymes, It Can Take a Microbial Village
A new study led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), demonstrates the importance of microbial communities as a source of stable enzymes that could be used to convert plants to biofuels. The study, recently published in the journal Nature Microbiology, reports on the discovery of new types of cellulases, enzymes that help break down plants into ingredients that can be used to make biofuels and bioproducts. The cellulases were cultured from a microbiome. Using a microbial community veers from the approach typically taken of using isolated organisms to obtain enzymes. Read more in the Berkeley Lab’s News Center.
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