Missions Overview
The Role of Living Systems in Energy Production, Environmental Remediation, and Carbon Cycling and Sequestration
The complexity of DOE’s missions requires groundbreaking research and integration across multiple disciplines to create new generations of technologies. In the coming decades, bioscience and biotechnology must play an increasing role in informing policy and decision making and providing innovative solutions. The earth’s living systems are a potential source of capabilities that we can put to use to meet national challenges; their study forms the core of the GTL program.
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Grand Challenges for Biology, Payoffs for the Nation
The ultimate GTL scientific goal is to attain a predictive systems-level understanding of plants and microbes. Each mission area has a distinct technical endpoint and set of subsidiary science goals. These goals define a unique set of research challenges that collectively will require new capabilities and a large body of integrated knowledge.
Energy Challenge
- Mission Science Goals: Understand the principles underlying the structural and functional design of living systems, and develop the capability to model, predict, and engineer optimized enzymes and microorganisms for the production of such biofuels as ethanol and hydrogen.
- Challenges: Analyze thousands of natural and modified variants of such processes as cellulose degradation, fermentative production of ethanol or other liquid fuels, and biophotolytic hydrogen production.
- DOE Mission Focus: Biofuels
- The Energy Challenge in Detail
Environmental Remediation
- Mission Science Goals: Understand the processes by which plants and microbes function in the earth's subsurface, mechanisms by which they impact the fate and transport of contaminants, and the scientific principles of bioremediation based on native populations and their interactions with the environment. Develop methods to relate genome-based understanding of molecular processes to long-term conceptual and predictive models for simulating contaminant fate and transport and development of remediation strategies.
- Challenges: Bioremediation will require understanding biogeochemical processes from the fundamental-molecular to community levels to describe contaminant-transformation processes coinciding with simulated changes in community composition and structure.
- Environmental Remediation in Detail
Carbon Cycling and Sequestration
- Mission Science Goals: Understand the mechanisms of carbon cycling in the earth’s ocean and terrestrial plant and microbial ecosystems, the roles they play in carbon sequestration, and how these processes respond to and impact climate change. Develop methods to relate genome-based ecophysiology (functionality) to the assessment of global carbon-sequestration strategies and climate impacts.
- Challenges: We are just beginning to understand the genetic and functional diversity of ocean and terrestrial ecosystems. They potentially contain millions of plant and microbial species organized in extensive communities. We must understand both the global and molecular mechanistic behaviors of these large systems.
- Carbon Cycling and Sequestration in Detail
