The projects of 13 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY19 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The funded projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including the harnessing of microbiome data to uncover patterns of mutualism, evaluating radiobiological effects of laser-accelerated ion beams, improving bioenergy yield under drought stress, and the application of machine learning in tomogram segmentation. Lab-wide, 89 projects were selected from a field of 158 proposals. Biosciences Area efforts account for 15.07 percent of the $22.2 million allocated.
FY20 Biosciences LDRD Information
Berkeley Lab Director Mike Witherell has initiated the 2020 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program and released the call for proposals. Activities and deadlines specific to the Biosciences Area are included on this schedule; any changes and updates will be posted there. For the FY2020 cycle, a first subset of proposals will be reviewed … Read more »
Building Standards for Neurophysiology Data
Researchers from Berkeley Lab and the Allen Institute for Brain Science will receive $2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a next-generation data format and software ecosystem for the Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology (NWB:N) project. With funding from the Kavli Foundation, Berkeley Lab scientists Oliver Ruebel and Andrew Tritt in the Computational Research Division and Kristofer Bouchard in the Biological Systems and Engineering Division led the development of the beta version of NWB:N 2.0, and will continue to advance the development of NWB:N as part of the NIH BRAIN Initiative. Berkeley Lab’s leadership in the NWB:N development would have not been possible without the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project BRAINformat: A Data Standardization Framework for Neuroscience Data. Berkeley Lab also hosted a user engagement hackathon earlier this year, bringing together users to help them adopt NWB:N.
Read more from Computing Sciences.
Ultrathin Membrane Both Isolates and Couples Living and Non-Living Catalysts
Biosciences researchers have developed a novel nanoscale membrane embedded with molecular wires that simultaneously chemically isolates, yet electrochemically couples, a microbial and an inorganic catalyst on the shortest possible length scale. This new modular architecture, described in a paper recently published in Nature Communications, opens up a large design space for building scalable biohybrid electrochemical systems for a variety of applications.
Biosciences Area FY18 LDRD Projects
The projects of 13 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY18 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. These projects span a diverse array of topics and approaches including the study of microbiomes in relation to patterns of mutualism, crop productivity, and gut health; synthetic biology for engineering biosurfactant production and energy conversion pathways; and the application of technologies such as machine learning, high-resolution optical microscopy, and single-cell transcriptomics. Together, these efforts account for 18.75 percent of the $20 million allocated. Lab-wide, 74 projects were selected from a field of 215.
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