Systems Biology for Energy and the Environment

The Genomic Science program pursues fundamental research to understand, predict, manipulate, and design plant and microbial systems for innovations in renewable energy, insights into environmental processes, and biotechnological breakthroughs supporting the U.S. bioeconomy.

Bioenergy

Providing the foundational genomics-based knowledge needed to produce and deconstruct renewable plant biomass and convert it to sustainable fuels, chemicals, and other bioproducts.

Biosystems Design

Accelerating the ability to securely design, build, and control plants and microbes for beneficial purposes such as clean energy, biomaterials, and carbon sequestration.

Environmental Microbiome

Developing a process-level understanding of how plant and soil microbial communities impact the cycling and fate of carbon, nutrients, and contaminants in the environment.

Enabling Capabilities

Computing and Cyberinfrastructure

Open-access and integrated computational and bioinformatic capabilities tailored to large-scale data science for research on plants, microbes, and their communities

Biomolecular Characterization and Imaging Science

Imaging and measurement technologies enabling visualization of the relationships among biomolecules, cellular compartments, and higher-order biological systems

DOE Scientific User Facilities

Integrated capabilities across user facilities and resources for genome sequencing and analysis, DNA design and synthesis, molecular sciences, structural biology, and imaging

Bioenergy Research Centers

Four Bioenergy Research Centers—each led by a DOE national laboratory or top university—take distinctive approaches to the common goal of improving and scaling up advanced biofuel and bioproduct production processes.

The multidisciplinary teams are tackling fundamental science challenges in:

Sustainability
Feedstock development
Deconstruction and separation
Conversion

Their research is identifying the genomic underpinnings of complex plant traits in promising bioenergy crops and streamlining deconstruction processes to funnel plant components into defined process streams. The centers are designing new pathways in microbes to convert plant biomass to a range of fuels, chemicals, and bioproducts. They also are developing the agronomic understanding needed to sustainably manage and produce bioenergy crops on marginal lands.