B-IOME Science and Capabilities
Microbes, including bacteria, algae, and yeast, can be used to manufacture valuable chemicals and polymers. Biomanufacturing approaches add new avenues for manufacturing in the US, increasing our nation’s independence, resiliency, and economic growth, while reducing waste and foreign imports. B-IOME scientists are developing synthetic biology tools and cultivation approaches to improve microbial strains for biomanufacturing.
- Testing and development of non-model microbes for biomanufacturing applications
- Algae biology
- High-throughput screening to assess new strains and identify new promising strain variants.
- Custom in vivo biosensors that are used to identify
- Improved enzyme activities
- New genes related to cell productivity
- New transporter sequences
- Cultivation systems across scales, from 96-well plates to 100L algae mini-ponds, including sophisticated bioreactors and environmental photobioreactors (ePBRs)
Los Alamos National Laboratory partners with industry, academia, and other national labs to achieve our goals in biomanufacturing:
- Agile BioFoundry
- DISCOVR
- Waste-to-Jet Consortium
Learn more about some of our work in biomanufacturing:
Crop and soil health are essential for successful domestic agriculture, and in addition to food crops, there are energy crops used as carbon feedstocks for biomanufacturing processes. Algae is both a microbial cell factory in biomanufacturing, as mentioned above, and is also cultivated as a crop for biomass and synthesis of natural products. Advancing these crops supports the US rural economy and expands US carbon supply chains. In plants and algae, microbes are naturally associated with crops and their environments. These crop microbiomes play critical roles in overall farm health, by supporting crop growth, nutrient exchange with the environment, and crop resilience to stress and pests.
B-IOME scientists are advancing knowledge of microbes and plants through their work on:
- Soil nutrient cycling
- Nutrient/drought management
- Growth promoting molecules and microbes
- Terrestrial ecology
- Algae pest studies
For many years, scientists at Los Alamos have been investigating the role of soil microbes in nutrient cycling, as well as the microbial interactions that influence plant resilience and productivity, through various DOE Office of Science programs.
Los Alamos tools that support these efforts include:
- Laboratory ecosystems (e.g. environmental photobioreactors, synthetic soil mesocosms, EcoFabs)
- Experimental photosynthetic systems such as sorghum, camelina, non-model microalgae and food crops
- Facilities designed for studying crop pests (Algae Pest Lab; Plant Pest Lab)
- Integrative ‘omics
- Single cell to biome investigations
- Fluorescence and live microscopic imaging
- Testbed/field and techno-economic analysis (TEA) partnerships
B-IOME scientists are using their expertise in high throughput screening, computational protein design, biosensors, and machine learning to help advance technologies used to recover valuable resources from wastes and to study the role of microbes in harmful algal blooms, wetland restoration, and wildfires.
- Computational protein design to enable biobased solutions for the separation of rare earth elements
- High-throughput screening for enzymes that can degrade plastic and/or textiles
- Studying the effects of wildfire on microbial travel & deposition
- Using machine learning to predict formation and toxicity of harmful algal blooms
- Developing biobased oil spill solutions
- Investigating the impacts of coastal wetland restoration
- Microbial and fungal sciences
- Plant and soil sciences
- Environmental simulation
- High-throughput screening
- Synthetic biology
- ‘Omics data and analysis
- Modeling and decision support
- Structural biology