Biological & Environmental Research

Planning for the future with environmental and biological research

Understanding how genomic information is translated to functional capabilities, and the roles of Earth’s biogeochemical systems so we can predict Earth Systems decades or centuries into the future.

The DOE Office of Science's Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program conducts research in sustainable biofuel production, improved carbon storage, Earth Systems prediction, and contaminant bioremediation.

This work advances our understanding of the roles of Earth’s atmosphere, land, oceans, sea ice, and subsurface in predicting feedbacks and understanding earth system process dynamics. Research results help improve our predictive understanding of the earth system across scales.

Biological Systems Science Division (BSSD) Portfolio

• Bacterial-Fungal Interactions, a LANL-led Science Focus Area (SFA) for the DOE Genome Science Program, combines DOE strengths in microbial genomics, computation, user facility capabilities, and ecosystem sciences to further a comprehensive understanding of the role of microbes in ecosystems.  This program stands to improve many aspects of ecology from earth system modeling and management to soil productivity and resilience.
• The Quantum Ghost Imaging of Water Content and Plant Health with Entangled Photon Pairs program is exploiting the quantum properties of entangled photon pairs for extremely low-light visualization of important processes in biofuel crops. In this type of quantum-enabled bioimaging, mid infrared light probes the sample of interest at wavelengths specific for key biofuel plant constituents (water, lipids, or lignocellulose), with image formation coming from an easier to visualize visible entangled photon that did not interact with the sample.
• Carbonaceous Aerosols: Water Uptake and Effects on Light Absorption: Bridging laboratory and field studies to inform model parameterizations.
• The Decoding Host-Pathogen Dynamics with 4D (Epi) Genomics research team is developing an experimental workflow to characterize and survey early-onset molecular signatures of infection found in the genome and epigenome, leveraging ASCR user facilities to create an exascale computational and explainable artificial intelligence (i.e., XAI) workflow, and integrating 3D genomic structural maps, epigenetic modifications, and cryo-electron microscopy to validate genome structure–function relationships.
• RESTOR-C (RESTORation of soil Carbon by precision biological strategies) is an Energy Earthshot Research Center funded by DOE-BER. The goal of RESTOR-C is to harness plants and microbes to increase carbon flux into soil carbon storage pools to form persistent carbon that is stable for >100 years, through partnerships between LBNL (lead), LANL, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, California State Univ. Monterey Bay, and NMSU.

Earth & Environmental System Sciences Division (EESSD) Portfolio

• The Los Alamos Field Instrument Deployments and Operations Office manages the BER Atmospheric Radiation Measurement infrastructure’s deployments to the Azores Islands in the Atlantic and two mobile facilities deployed worldwide, to study atmospheric processes.
• LANL is responsible for developing next-generation ocean, sea ice, land ice, and computational performance components of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model.
• Through the Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software (IDEAS) project, LANL increases scientific productivity by realizing the potential of advanced software and computing resources, with applications in watershed science.
• LANL leads coastal science initiatives for BER in the Arctic, through the Interdisciplinary Research for Arctic Coastal Environments project, and coastal ocean model development for Integrated Coastal Modeling of the mid-Atlantic region.
• LANL leads the fine-scale model development of arctic terrestrial and subsurface processes for the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment in the Arctic. The Lab conducts experiments at the surface and subsurface through synoptic surveys of small- and large-scale hydrological features. 
• The High-Latitude Application and Testing of Earth System Models project applies high-performance, multi-scale models to study how changes in the high-latitude Earth system respond and contribute to global change.