The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science oversees the construction and operation of some of the Nation's most advanced research and development user facilities, located at national laboratories and universities. These state-of-the-art facilities are shared with the science community worldwide and offer some technologies and instrumentation that are available nowhere else. Guidelines for submitting proposals for access to these facilities are available from the individual centers.
Presented below and on the corresponding pages are descriptions of some of the most important facilities for biological research.
Sequencing more than one trillion DNA base pairs per year, JGI in Walnut Creek, California, provides state-of-the-science capabilities for genome sequencing and analysis. With more than 1100 worldwide collaborators on active projects, JGI is the preeminent facility for sequencing plants, microbes, and microbial communities that are foundational to energy and environmental research.
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By integrating experimentation with supercomputing, EMSL in Richland, Washington, enables the study of environmental challenges at the molecular level. EMSL has helped thousands of researchers use a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to solve important challenges in biological interactions and dynamics, subsurface science, and interactions at the interfaces of natural and engineered materials.
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Synchrotron light sources and neutron facilities at DOE national laboratories enable resolution of the structure of matter from the cellular level down to the atomic and molecular level using approaches not possible with conventional instrumentation. The intense beams of X rays and radiation of other wavelengths from synchrotrons, and the beams of neutrons from reactors and accelerators are directed toward experiment stations with instruments designed for specific structural investigations. The Structural Biology Infrastructure program provides user access to these experimental stations for research in all areas of biology.
See a list of the BER structural biology experimental stations »