Biological and Environmental Research

The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program supports scientific research and facilities to achieve a predictive understanding of complex biological, earth, and environmental systems with the aim of advancing the nation’s energy and infrastructure security. The program seeks to discover the underlying biology of plants and microbes as they respond to and modify their environments. This knowledge enables the reengineering of microbes and plants for energy and other applications. BER research also advances understanding of the dynamic processes needed to model the Earth system, including atmospheric, land masses, ocean, sea ice, and subsurface processes. Over the last three decades, BER has transformed biological and Earth system science. We helped map the human genome and lay the foundation for modern biotechnology. We pioneered the initial research on atmospheric and ocean circulation that eventually led to climate and Earth system models. In the last decade, BER research has made considerable advances in biology underpinning the production of biofuels and bioproducts from renewable biomass, spearheaded progress in genome sequencing and genomic science, and strengthened the predictive capabilities of ecosystem and global scale models using the world’s fastest computers. BER supports three DOE Office of Science user facilities, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), and Joint Genome Institute (JGI). These facilities house unique world-class scientific instruments and capabilities that are available to the entire research community on a competitive, peer review basis. Additionally, four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers were established to pursue innovative early-stage research on bio-based products, clean energy, and next-generation bioenergy technologies. BER’s scientific impact has been transformative. In 1986, the Human Genome Project gave birth to modern biotechnology and genomics-based systems biology. Today, researchers in the BER Genomic Sciences activity and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), as well as in the four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs), are using the powerful tools of plant and microbial systems biology to pursue the innovative early-stage research that will lead to the development of future transformative bio-based products, clean energy, and next generation technologies. Since the 1950s, BER has been a critical contributor to environmental and Earth system science research in the U.S., beginning with studies of chemical dispersion and atmospheric global circulation—the forerunners of climate models. Presently, BER research contributes to model development, analysis, diagnostics, and intercomparisons using data from its process level research conducted by large scale experiments and access to the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) and Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) user facilities. In the last decade, DOE research has made considerable advances in increasing the predictive capabilities of watershed, regional, and global scale models using applied mathematics and access to the world’s fastest computers.