November 19, 2020
BY U.S. Department of Energy
On Nov. 16, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to provide up to $15 million for bioimaging research to develop new and improved instrumentation and approaches to visualizing metabolic processes in living cells.
“Visualizing cellular processes as they happen in vivo is critical to deepening our insight into biological processes,” said Chris Fall, director of DOE’s Office of Science. “These techniques will provide the new methods needed to measure cellular processes as they happen—information important for understanding, predicting, and ultimately designing beneficial new biological processes.”
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Research will have two main areas of focus: (1) development of new innovative or significantly improved instrumentation and (2) demonstration of improved observational techniques. The effort is aimed particularly at improving understanding of the complex cellular processes involved in conversion of plant biomass into biofuels and bioproducts, plant-microbe interactions, and carbon fixation in soil by microbes and plants, among other topics.
Applications will be open to universities, industry, and nonprofit research institutions as the lead institution, with possible collaborators at the DOE national laboratories and other federal agencies. Funding is to be awarded competitively, on the basis of peer review, and is expected to be in the form of three-year awards.
Planned funding is up to $5 million per year for three years beginning in Fiscal Year 2021, pending congressional appropriations.
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The DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement, issued by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) within the Department’s Office of Science, can be found on the BER funding opportunities page.
The U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) announced up to $23 million in funding to support research and development (R&D) of domestic chemicals and fuels from biomass and waste resources.
The U.S. DOE has announced its intent to issue funding to support high-impact research and development (R&D) projects in two priority areas: sustainable propane and renewable chemicals and algal system cultivation and preprocessing.
Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., in August introduced the Renewable Chemicals Act, a bill that aims to create a tax credit to support the production of biobased chemicals.
The Chemical Catalysis for Bioenergy Consortium, a consortium of the U.S. DOE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office, has launched an effort that aims to gather community input on the development of new biomass processing facilities.
USDA on March 8 celebrated the second annual National Biobased Products Day, a celebration to raise public awareness of biobased products, their benefits and their contributions to the U.S. economy and rural communities.