Feature Articles

Wei-Jun Qian is a staff scientist and team lead in the Integrative Omics group in the Biological Sciences Division of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Wendy Shaw is the director for the Physical Sciences Division at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The Early Career Award program provides financial support that is foundational to young scientists, freeing them to focus on executing their research goals.

Scientists have shown how a tiny flaw in a protein results in damaged enamel that is prone to decay in people with a condition known as amelogenesis imperfecta. Such patients don't develop enamel correctly because of a single amino acid defect in the critical enamel protein called amelogenin.

PNNL scientists and colleagues at Baylor and elsewhere have taken one of the most in-depth looks ever at the riot of protein activity that underlies colon cancer and have identified potential new molecular targets to try to stop the disease.

Difficult issues persist in knowing how glass, metals, and ceramics behave over thousands of years. The diverse team at the Center for Performance and Design of Nuclear Waste Forms and Containers is learning the secrets of such materials to contain defense-related nuclear waste for thousands of years.

Cleaning up waste from Cold War era nuclear arsenal production could cost billions and take decades. An intense, diverse group at the IDREAM Energy Frontier Research Center is providing answers around aluminum and other troublemakers in the waste that drive up costs and lengthen timelines.

Jim Mather has a rather unusual job. He's the director of a laboratory without walls, Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility, that gathers never-before-seen atmospheric data at sites around the world.

Scientists have developed a deep neural network that sidesteps a problem that has bedeviled efforts to apply artificial intelligence to tackle complex chemistry -- a shortage of precisely labeled chemical data. The new method gives scientists an additional tool to apply deep learning to explore drug discovery, new materials for manufacturing, and a swath of other applications.

<p>Scientists, community leaders and others will gather Aug. 3-4 to celebrate the achievements of the first 20 years of EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. </p>

A team of scientists in the Pacific Northwest has solved the 3-D structure of 1,000 proteins from more than 70 organisms that cause infectious disease in people. The proteins the team has studied come from microbes that cause several serious diseases, including tuberculosis, Listeria, Giardia, Ebola, anthrax, C. diff., Legionella, Lyme, chlamydia and the flu.