News By Location

Using the tools of synthetic biology, JBEI researchers are engineering healthy plants whose lignocellulosic biomass can more easily be broken down into simple sugars for the production of clean, green and renewable advanced biofuels.

Rapidly growing trees like poplars and willows are candidate "biofuel crops" from which it is expected that cellulosic ethanol and higher energy content fuels can be efficiently extracted. Domesticating these crops requires a deep understanding of tree physiology and genetics. Scientists are turning to fruit trees for hints, leading to an international initiative, including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers, publishing the 265-million base genome of the Lovell variety of Prunus persica in Nature Genetics.

Engineering a unique metamaterial of gold nanoantennas, Berkeley Lab researchers were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

Thanks to a supersensitive space telescope and some sophisticated supercomputing, scientists from the international Planck collaboration have made the closest reading yet of the most ancient story in our universe: The cosmic microwave background.

The Planck collaboration will soon release its first cosmological results from trillions of measurements of the cosmic microwave background. Crucial to the results were tens of millions of hours of massively parallel processing at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and the expertise of the Computational Cosmology Center's physicists and computational scientists.

The ultrafast, ultrabright X-ray pulses of the Linac Coherent Light Source have enabled unprecedented views of a catalyst in action, an important step in the effort to develop cleaner and more efficient energy sources.

DNA sequences and statistical models have been unveiled that greatly increase the reliability and precision by which microbes can be engineered.