Year: 2022
Type: report
Abstract: The mission of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program's Bioimaging Science Program (BSP) is to understand the translation of genomic information into the mechanisms that power living cells, communities of cells, and whole organisms.The goal of BSP is to develop new imaging and measurement technologies to visualize the spatial and temporal relationships of key metabolic processes governing phenotypic expression in plants and microbes.The extended goal of dynamic imaging is to functionally connect cellular components and interdependent organisms.Information about the time and place of chemical reactions in situ can identify causal relationships between biological activators and downstream effectors.Technologies are inspired by their eventual application to biological hypothesis-driven research.BSP supports fundamental imaging research for proof-of-concept studies of novel untested methods and devices and for working prototypes and biological validation studies relevant to BER bioenergy and environmental research.The role of bioimaging in the larger portfolio includes visualizing spatiotemporal expression patterns of natural or engineered pathways, tracking specific metabolic pathways between intact living cells, and illuminating causal interrelationships among plant tissue layers or microbial colonies in the rhizosphere.BER continues its support of use-inspired optical and electron methods with funding announcements for academic, commercial, and DOE national laboratories.A recent addition extends BER support to quantum sensing and imaging approaches for circumventing fundamental limitations of classical optical techniques.Limitations include statistical photon noise, light scattering in thick samples, photo-damage of cellular chemistry, and reporters that perturb molecular function.Bioimaging enhanced with quantum phenomena will benefit from improvements in detector sensitivity, image resolution, and noise reduction and from repetitive imaging of fragile samples without damage.Methods that use light beyond the visible range might be necessary to see new features of biological shape and movement.To determine the potential of quantum science for bioenergy and basic biology research of the BSP, the BER program sponsored a workshop at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published the proceedings, "Quantum Science Concepts in Enhancing Sensing and Imaging Technologies applications for Biology" to identify both promising quantum detection methods and quantum-based biological processes.DOE supports five large-scale quantum information science (QIS) centers across the Office of Science to develop materials, computation, and communication network capabilities.BER participates by providing partial support for one of these centers to develop high-performance instruments and quantum sensors.BSP held its annual PI meeting virtually February 28-March 1. Contributing investigators are convened to review progress and current state-of-the-art bioimaging research.Holding the 2022 BSP meeting as part of the broader Genomic Science Program (GSP) PI meeting allowed researchers to interact with the extended GSP community.This convergence provided a platform for networking and exchange of ideas with experts in other technologies and in target BSP application areas, helping to forge new multidisciplinary collaborations among investigators from the sister programmatic areas within BER's Biological Systems Science Division.An important highlight of the BSP meeting was the keynote presentation by Nobel Laureate Dr. Joachim Frank on Time-Resolved Macromolecular Imaging using Cryo-EM.He discussed microfluidic mixing and fast freezing to capture nonequilibrium intermediate states during molecular binding and conformational changes.The action of molecular machines can be captured at nanometer resolution and millisecond discrimination.BSP PIs made presentations describing their research focus and progress in plenary sessions on bioimaging science and on quantum-enabled bioimaging science research projects.BSP research at universities and DOE laboratories is presented in this report.A final discussion of the BSP was organized by meeting plenary session chairs, who prepared the following Executive Summary of current BSP research, research challenges, future opportunities, and potential ideas for expanding the BSP's impact and interactions.
DOI: 10.2172/2202662
Authors: James Evans, Theodore Goodson III, Andreas Vasdekis, Shiva Abbaszadeh
Language: English
Subfield: Biophysics
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4387861515