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Facilities and resources
One of ten National Laboratories under the stewardship of the U.S.
Department of Energy, Berkeley Lab facilitates advanced research for
individual investigators and multi-institution research teams alike.
The facilities and resources of the Physical Biosciences Division
represent a multi-discliplinary, world-class approach to addressing
scientific problems of national and global importance. |
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| The Berkeley
Center for Structural Biology is located within the Advanced
Light Source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The BCSB
is a national user facility serving over 750 scientists, representing
160 different research groups. The Center has eight beamlines optimized
for macromolecular protein crystallography constructed and operated
by several Participating Research Teams (PRTs), funded in part by
DOE/OBER and NIH/NIGMS with contributions from numerous academic and
industrial groups. There are six tuneable-wavelength MAD beamlines
capable of phasing structures as large as the 70S ribosome. Crystal
automounters on three beamlines to facilitate rapid screening of crystals
as part of drug design and structural genomics programs. |
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| The Berkeley
Structural Genomics Center is one of nine pilot centers
funded by the NIH, National Institute of General Medical Sciences
as part of its Protein Structure Initiative. The goal of this initiative
is to organize all known proteins into their structural families and
then determining the structure of one or more proteins per family.
The center is focusing on two bacteria with extremely small genomes
to study proteins essential for independent life. The bacteria, Mycoplasma
genitalium and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, are closely related
organisms that are very common human pathogens. |
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| The Computational
Crystallography Initiative (CCI) is part of the Physical
Biosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The
focus of the initiative is the development of computational tools
for high-throughput structure determination. One of CCI's primary
goals is the creation of a novel software package called PHENIX (Python-based
Hierarchical Environment for Integrated Xtallography). This software
is being developed as part of an international collaboration, funded
by NIH and headed by the CCI group. Those currently involved are:
Tom Terwilliger (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Randy Read (University
of Cambridge, U.K.), Tom Ioerger and Jim Sacchettini (Texas A&M
University). |
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| The Virtual
Institute of Microbial Stress and Survival (VIMSS) supports
an integrated program to understand the ability of bacteria and other
microogranisms to respond to and survive external stresses.The inaugural
project for VIMSS is a $36.6 million effort for Genomes to Life, a
major initiative in systems biology from the Department of Energy’s
Office of Science. For this project, VIMSS scientists will describe
and predict the stress responses of microbes to environmental conditions
in metal and radionuclide contaminated waste sites. A major goal of
the project is to provide the scientific breakthroughs to accelerate
this process at a greatly reduced cost. In doing so, the researchers
aim to build a quantitative understanding of the structure and action
of these microbes and how they can be redesigned for exciting new
purposes. |
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| The National Center
for X-Ray Tomography is a joint effort between the Univeristy
of California, San Francisco and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to
establish a first-of-its-kind x-ray microscope to perform “cat scans”
of biological cells, and other unprecedented capabilities for cell and molecular
biology studies. The new microscopy resource also promises a better understanding
of human diseases at the molecular level and possibly new discoveries for
treating those diseases. |
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GTL@Berkeley
Lab, in close collaboration with UC Berkeley and other universities
and national laboratories, is applying its expertise and resources to achieve
the goals of the U.S. Department of Energy's Genomics:GTL program (formerly
Genomes to Life). Using genomic data and high-throughput technologies, we're
studying proteins encoded by genomes to explore the diverse natural capabilities
in microbes. In doing so, we will help solve larger DOE challenges in energy
production, environmental cleanup, and global climate change. The Physical
Biosciences Division has four research projects in this area, and is poised
for a key role in the future of the Genomics:GTL program.
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