The “Discovery” track of Berkeley Lab’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development proposal review encourages bold, highly innovative concepts with strong potential for impact in their fields, independent of divisional programs and lab-wide initiatives. The winning proposals for 2010 are described in a five-part series, concluding with this look at the search for industrial solutions to producing band-gap graphene structures with nanoscale resolution.

The “Discovery” track of Berkeley Lab’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development proposal review encourages bold, highly innovative concepts with strong potential for impact in their fields, independent of divisional programs and lab-wide initiatives. The winning proposals for 2010 are described in a five-part series, beginning with research for a new way to deposit high-quality, transparent, metal-oxide films on the industrial scale, with implications for energy applications.

For the first time, the widely used molecular synthesis technique known as click chemistry has been safely applied to a living organism. A team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers has developed a unique copper-free version of click chemistry to create biomolecular probes for in vivo studies of live mice.

Berkeley Lab researchers at the Molecular Foundry have created bowtie-shaped antennae that function as the first tunable nano colorsorters, able to capture, filter and steer light at the nanoscale.

Berkeley Lab scientists have created bright, stable and bio-friendly nanocrystals that act as individual investigators of activity within a cell. These ideal light emitting probes represent a significant step in scrutinizing the behaviors of proteins and other components in complex systems such as a living cell.

The Department of Energy will invest $777 million in 46 new Energy Frontier Research Centers over the next five years as part of President Barack Obama’s plans to reinvigorate American science. Berkeley Lab will be home to the Center for Nanoscale Control of Geologic CO2, led by Don DePaolo, director of the Earth Sciences Division, to study carbon dioxide storage deep underground.

Researchers at Berkeley Lab and Stanford University have developed a new method to characterize how a single photon can create multiple charge carriers—a phenomenon that could be used to develop more efficient solar cells.

By programming cells with short lengths of synthetic DNA on their surfaces, scientists at the Molecular Foundry control how different cell types bind together to form complex artificial microtissues for potential uses in medicine and in medical and biological research.

“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.

A compound synthesized for the first time by Berkeley Lab scientists could help to push nanotechnology out of the lab and into faster electronic devices, more powerful sensors, and other advanced technologies. The scientists developed a hoop-shaped chain of benzene molecules that had eluded synthesis, despite numerous efforts, since it was theorized more than 70 years ago.