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Jay Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering, associate laboratory director at Berkeley Lab, CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute and director of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, is the recipient of the 2013 George Washington Carver Award for innovation in industrial biotechnology. The award is presented annually by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).

With the support of a Bakar Fellowship, researcher Neil Tsutsui is testing the pest-control effectiveness of a synthetic version of a natural ant pheromone he discovered. The fellowship, which supports innovative research by early career UC Berkeley faculty, is accepting applications for the 2012-14 year now.

Scientists at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered new materials that can soak up methane, a substantial and growing driver of global climate change.

Chronic stress is known to cause major health problems, yet acute stress is thought to improve people's performance and health. A new study by UC Berkeley professor Daniela Kaufer shows why that is. Stress generates new nerve cells in the brain that, two weeks later, help people learn better.

With more than 300 free events and activities — shoehorned into one unforgettable day of arts, music, dance, science, games and fun — UC Berkeley's annual open-house is the place to be April 20.

NASA has awarded UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory up to $200 million to build a satellite to determine how Earth’s weather affects weather at the edge of space, in hopes of improving forecasts of extreme “space weather” that can disrupt global positioning satellites (GPS) and radio communications.

Physicist and applied mathematician Fernando Pérez has received the Free Software Foundation’s 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his open-source application iPython, which makes it easier for scientists to use the powerful Python programming language to crunch Big Data.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office honored UC Berkeley's technology transfer office for its socially responsible licensing to provide low-cost treatments and technologies to people in developing countries, highlighted by the successful licensing of a discovery leading to a newly launched yeast-derived malaria drug. Other projects are nutritionally fortified sorghum & disease-resistant crops.

The best therapy today for malaria is a drug combination that includes a derivative of artemisinin, now solely available from plants. On April 11, Sanofi began production of the first semi-synthetic version of artemisinin, derived from yeast developed by biotech company Amyris based on discoveries in the laboratory of Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley.

"Ubiquitin" is the apt term for a molecule that plays a vital role in every cell in our body. Associate Professor Michael Rape, winner of a 2012 Bakar Fellowship, is now on the trail of a potential drug to interrupt excessive ubiquitin production and prevent uncontrolled cell division, a hallmark of cancer.

“Incorporating Green Chemistry Concepts into Mobile Chemistry Applications and Their Potential Uses.” Ekins, S.; Clark, A. M.; Williams, A. J. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2013, 1, 8-13. DOI: 10.1021/sc3000509

We here at GreenChemBlog have not posted in a while, but still hope to post and are still looking for contributors to the blog. Posts might be a bit shorter going forward, though, in order for us to post more frequently.

I’ve expanded my reading recently to include a new ACS journal, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. In the first issue is the above article, which highlights a few recent additions to the smart phone/tablet world that utilize green chemistry!

The focus of the above paper is mostly on “Green Solvents”, which the authors developed based on the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable Solvent Selection Guide. It is freely available for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. (I personally use the Android platform for which the very similar app “Lab Solvents” is available) The authors also cover a few other green chemistry apps, so read the paper for more info! I especially like the Process Mass Intensity feature of the Yield101 app, though this app is $5.

For Green Solvents, the app entry page features a list of common solvents displayed as their chemical structures. More desirable solvents are color coded with a green background; less desirable solvents are color coded with a brown background. Selecting a solvent molecule brings up a box that lists the chemical’s name, CAS number, as well as scores on a scale of 1 – 10 for each of the five following categories: safety, health, environment (air), environment (water), and environment (waste). The lower the number, the greener the solvent. In addition, the numbers are color coded with 1-3 displayed as green, 4-7 displayed as yellow and 8-10 displayed as red. Furthermore, the selection box includes easily chosen links to the ChemSpider Web site, the Mobile Reagents app, and the Mobile Molecular DataSheet for more information on the selected solvent.

The power of the app is how quickly one can obtain info that should impact solvent choices in lab or in the field (without having to retreat to your desk or a nearby computer). And it’s free!

In the future I hope to see these apps provide suggestions for alternative solvent choices (for example, this editorial provides an example of a table Pfizer uses for solvent selection). For instance, I already know dichloromethane is a poor choice of solvent from a green chemistry perspective. How about an alternative choice, Green Solvents app? Trifluorotoluene?

Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think your password, according to School of Information researchers.

"We need to learn not only what is encoded in the genome – the blueprint of life – but how that actually translates into protein function in health and disease," says Amy Herr, a Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering. Her research is supported by the campus’s Bakar Fellows Program, which helps early-career faculty pursue innovative research with commercial promise.

President Barack Obama has announced a major national initiative to understand how the brain works and how it goes awry. Neuroscientist John Ngai, chemist Paul Alivisatos and chemical engineer Jay Keasling were on hand at the White House to lend support to the so-called BRAIN initiative, which Ngai termed "our moon project."

UC Berkeley climatologist John Chiang, geography graduate student Andrew Friedman and colleagues from the University of Washington found that changes in the temperature difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres during the 20th century were linked to catastrophic changes in tropical rainfall. As the difference rises, the tropics could see future rainfall disruptions.

Wired writer Daniela Hernandez profiles UC Berkeley's David Anderson, creator of the BOINC platform that runs SETI@home and other crowd-sourced projects, and efforts to capture the computing power of smart phones. Anderson is now testing software on the Android phone that would allow anyone to plug into Einstein@home, another crowd-sourced project, to search for black holes.

A dozen of the pioneers of synthetic biology gathered on campus March 25 to discuss the revolutionary potential of "programming life," which some compared to the digital revolution. The event was co-hosted by SynBERC and Discover magazine.

Neuroengineer Jose Carmena and bioengineer Michel Maharbiz are working to develop a brain-machine interface, an emerging technology for retraining the brain to operate a prosthetic device such as an artificial limb. They are supported by the campus’s Bakar Fellows Program, which helps early-career faculty pursue innovative research with commercial promise. The program is currently accepting applications for 2013/14.

The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, supported in part by NASA, has obtained the most precise picture yet of the temperature of the early universe, from which they've updated the age of the universe and the proportions of normal and dark matter and dark energy. At a Mar. 21 NASA press conference, UC Berkeley physicist Martin White called the Planck data "stunning."

Scientists have developed a computer model of integrin, a protein that helps cells interact with their surroundings. The virtual integrin snippet is about the same length and behaves in similar ways to its biological counterpart. The result is a new way to explore how the protein connects a cell’s inner and outer environments.