Systems Biology for Energy and the Environment
The Genomic Science program pursues fundamental research to understand, predict, manipulate, and design plant and microbial systems for innovations in renewable energy, insights into environmental processes, and biotechnological breakthroughs supporting the U.S. bioeconomy.
Frontier Science for the Bioeconomy Reports Now Available
This four-part series defines frontiers of plant science, agriculture, synthetic biology, biobased materials, and environmental microbiome science that will unlock the promise of an innovative, resilient U.S. bioeconomy.
Hosted by the DOE Biological and Environmental Research program, the four workshops behind the report series brought together hundreds of participants from academia, industry, and DOE national laboratories, with expertise spanning plant physiology, plant genetics, genomics, computational biology, modeling, microbiology, and ecology.
Bioenergy
Providing the foundational genomics-based knowledge needed to produce and deconstruct renewable plant biomass and convert it to sustainable fuels, chemicals, and other bioproducts.
Biosystems Design
Accelerating the ability to securely design, build, and control plants and microbes for beneficial purposes such as bioenergy production and bioproducts.
Environmental Microbiome
Developing a process-level understanding of how plant and soil microbial communities impact the cycling and fate of carbon, nutrients, and contaminants in the environment.
Enabling Capabilities
Computing and Cyberinfrastructure
Open-access and integrated computational and bioinformatic capabilities tailored to large-scale data science for research on plants, microbes, and their communities
Biomolecular Characterization and Imaging Science
Imaging and measurement technologies enabling visualization of the relationships among biomolecules, cellular compartments, and higher-order biological systems
DOE Scientific User Facilities
Integrated capabilities across user facilities and resources for genome sequencing and analysis, DNA design and synthesis, molecular sciences, structural biology, and imaging
Bioenergy Research Centers
Four Bioenergy Research Centers—each led by a DOE national laboratory or top university—take distinctive approaches to the common goal of improving and scaling up advanced biofuel and bioproduct production processes.
The multidisciplinary teams are tackling fundamental science challenges in:
- Sustainability
- Feedstock development
- Deconstruction and separation
- Conversion
Their research is identifying the genomic underpinnings of complex plant traits in promising bioenergy crops and streamlining deconstruction processes to funnel plant components into defined process streams. The centers are designing new pathways in microbes to convert plant biomass to a range of fuels, chemicals, and bioproducts. They also are developing the agronomic understanding needed to sustainably manage and produce bioenergy crops on marginal lands.
