In New York state, a team led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has engineered poplar trees to produce valuable chemicals that can be used to make biodegradable plastics and other products. The modified trees were more tolerant of high salt levels in soil and were easier to break […]
In Illinois, despite their fundamental differences, plants, animals, and fungi share certain metabolic processes. Biologists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that a unique protein plays a key role in one such process—yet the protein is found only in plants. As described in a study just published in Science […]
In Illinois, biologists and computational scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently refined two artificial intelligence (AI) programs originally built by Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to predict protein shapes. Their new combined model, called ESMBind, can predict the 3D structure of proteins to reveal how they bind to […]
In New York state, efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions from transportation fuels are increasing demand for oil produced by nonfood crops. These plants use sunlight to power the conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide into oil, which accumulates in seeds. Crop breeders interested in selecting plants that produce a lot of oil look for yellow […]
In New York state, biologists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated a new way to boost the oil content of plant leaves and seeds. As described in the journal New Phytologist, the scientists identified and successfully altered key portions of a protein that protects newly synthesized oil droplets. The […]
In New York state, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Columbia University have developed a way to convert carbon dioxide (CO2), a potent greenhouse gas, into carbon nanofibers, materials with a wide range of unique properties and many potential long-term uses. Their strategy uses tandem electrochemical and thermochemical reactions […]
