Just like electronics, living cells use electrons for energy and information transfer. Despite electrons being a common “language” of the living and electronic worlds, living cells cannot speak to our largely technological realm. Giving a cell the ability to communicate directly with an electrode would lead to enormous opportunities in the development of new energy conversion techniques, fuel production, biological reporters, or new forms of bioelectronic systems. Building off previous research, a group led by Berkeley Lab’s Caroline Ajo-Franklin has now demonstrated that engineered E. coli strains can generate measurable current at an anode.

Free electron lasers (FELs) have proven their worth, but next-generation light sources will have to do better than produce ultrabright x-ray pulses 100 or so times a second. What’s needed is megahertz rep rate, a million times a second. Since it’s electrons that make the x-rays, the only way to achieve that kind of performance [...]

If nanoscience were television, we’d be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light—the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color—is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers. But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at Berkeley Lab that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible.

Two Berkeley Lab research projects were awarded grants by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to advance energy technologies. The two grants total nearly $5 million. One will focus on smart window technologies and the other on thermal mapping of buildings.

Berkeley Lab researchers have shown that a concept widely accepted as describing the folding of a single individual protein is also applicable to the self-assembly of multiple proteins. Their findings provide important guidelines for future biomimicry efforts, particularly for device fabrication and nanoscale synthesis.

Researchers at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry developed a first-of-its-kind model for providing a comprehensive description of the way in which molecular bonds form and rupture. This model enables researchers to predict the “binding free energy” of a given molecular system, a key to predicting how that molecule will interact with other molecules.

Based on interactions between their constituent amino acids, proteins form specific conformations, folding and twisting into distinct, chemically directed shapes. Past efforts to predict protein structure have met with limited success, but now a scientific team in collaboration with investigators from Berkeley Lab have demonstrated that a computer modeling approach similar to one used to predict protein structures can accurately predict peptoid conformation as well.

Berkeley Lab researchers have reported the first direct observation of nanoparticles undergoing oriented attachment, the critical step in biomineralization and the growth of nanocrystals. A better understanding of oriented attachment in nanoparticles is a key to synthesizing new materials with remarkable structural properties.

Imagine tracking a deer through a forest by clipping a radio transmitter to its ear and monitoring the deer’s location remotely. Now imagine that transmitter is the size of a house, and you understand the problem researchers may encounter when they try to use nanoparticles to track proteins in live cells.
Understanding how a protein moves [...]

At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, scientists have provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film. These results also show how such organic films can be chemically modified to improve conductance for superior organic electronics.