The structure of a protein in days — not months or years — ushers in a new era in genomics research. Scientists have developed a high-throughput protein pipeline that could expedite the development of biofuels and elucidate how proteins carry out life’s vital functions.

Scientists have a better understanding of what causes an abnormal number of chromosomes in offspring, a condition called aneuploidy that encompasses the most common genetic disorders in humans, such as Down syndrome, and is a leading cause of pregnancy loss.

How do some bacteria survive conditions that should kill them? In groundbreaking research, Berkeley Lab scientists used the Advanced Light Source to track chemical changes in individual bacteria that enable them to adapt to extreme environments.

An $18 million, three-year grant to develop new and more effective therapies to fight breast cancer was awarded May 27 to a multi-institutional “Dream Team” of scientists and clinicians that is co-led by Joe Gray, director of Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. The team will pursue personalized treatment that targets individual cancers with tailored therapies.

Working with unique chips that mimic actual molecular conditions in the breast, a team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab’s Mark LaBarge and Mina Bissell has shown that the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell in a woman’s breast – whether the cell develops normally or whether it turns cancerous – may depend upon signals from multiple microenvironments

Glycans are sugars that occur throughout living things and are particularly abundant on the surfaces of cells. Carolyn Bertozzi has developed a series of techniques to manipulate these ubiquitous biomolecules; one of the most intriguing uses lies in imaging. In spectacular recent experiments, Bertozzi and her colleagues tracked glycans moving and rearranging themselves in developing zebrafish.

What does uncovering the true authorship of plays attributed to Shakespeare have to do with identifying our genetic ancestors or classifying new life forms? All involve the comparative analysis of long sets of data and all will benefit from a unique new analytical tool developed by researchers at Berkeley Lab called “feature frequency profiles.”

Vigorous exercise may help prevent both cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, according to a pair of studies that tracked approximately 41,000 runners for more than seven years. The research, which is among the first to suggest that vigorous exercise may help prevent vision loss, offers hope for people seeking to fend off the onset of eye disease.

“Aldehyde tags” invented by Berkeley Lab scientists are used to label proteins in bacterial recombinant-DNA systems — and now in proteins that can only be expressed by mammalian recombinant-DNA systems. While some recombinant drugs like insulin are made in bacterial systems, most have to be produced by mammalian cells. Aldehyde tags direct chemical modifications to specific sites on proteins, including monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutics important in the pharmaceutical industry.