United States Dept. of Energy Office of Science

Carbon cycling and biosequestration integrating biology and climate through systems science : report from the March 2008 workshop ( Book )
2 editions published in 2008 in English and held by 179 libraries worldwide
One of the most daunting challenges facing science in the 21st Century is to predict how Earth's ecosystems will respond to global climate change. The global carbon cycle plays a central role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels and thus Earth's climate, but our basic understanding of the myriad of tightly interlinked biological processes that drive the global carbon cycle remains limited at best. Whether terrestrial and ocean ecosystems will capture, store, or release carbon is highly dependent on how changing climate conditions affect processes performed by the organisms that form Earth's biosphere. Advancing our knowledge of biological components of the global carbon cycle is thus crucial to predicting potential climate change impacts, assessing the viability of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, and informing relevant policy decisions. Global carbon cycling is dominated by the paired biological processes of photosynthesis and respiration. Photosynthetic plants and microbes of Earth's land-masses and oceans use solar energy to transform atmospheric CO₂ into organic carbon. The majority of this organic carbon is rapidly consumed by plants or microbial decomposers for respiration and returned to the atmosphere as CO₂. Coupling between the two processes results in a near equilibrium between photosynthesis and respiration at the global scale, but some fraction of organic carbon also remains in stabilized forms such as biomass, soil, and deep ocean sediments. This process, known as carbon biosequestration, temporarily removes carbon from active cycling and has thus far absorbed a substantial fraction of anthropogenic carbon emissions.

Systems biology knowledgebase for a new era in biology ( Book )
1 edition published in 2009 in English and held by 177 libraries worldwide
"Biology has entered a systems-science era with the goal to establish a predictive understanding of the mechanisms of cellular function and the interactions of biological systems with their environment and with each other. Vast amounts of data on the composition, physiology, and function of complex biological systems and their natural environments are emerging from new analytical technologies. Effectively exploiting these data requires developing a new generation of capabilities for analyzing and managing the information. By revealing the core principles and processes conserved in collective genomes across all biology and by enabling insights into the interplay between an organism's genotype and its environment, systems biology will allow scientific breakthroughs in our ability to project behaviors of natural systems and to manipulate and engineer managed systems. These breakthroughs will benefit Department of Energy (DOE) missions in energy security, climate protection, and environmental remediation. To promote development of a data and information management system, or knowledgebase, DOE's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER) hosted a workshop May 28-30, 2008, in Washington, D.C. Experts from scientific disciplines relevant to DOE missions and from the enabling technologies (e.g., bioinformatics, computer science, database development, and systems architecture) met to determine the opportunities and requirements for developing and managing this knowledgebase for OBER's Genomics:GTL program (GTL). Workshop participants defined the proposed GTL knowledgebase, or GKB, as an informatics resource that would focus on DOE science-application areas yet also be widely and easily applicable to all systems biology research. Also discussed were requirements for effective development of data capabilities for systems biology that could be applied specifically to plants and microbes (i.e., bacteria, archaea, fungi, and protists--unicellular eukaryotes such as microalgae) as well as to three areas of science related to DOE missions: (1) researching and developing biofuels, (2) advancing fundamental understanding of the global carbon cycle, and (3) understanding and using biological systems for environmental remediation. Participants were organized into working groups based on four knowledgebase themes: data, metadata, and information; data integration; database architecture and infrastructure; and community and user issues. The workshop highlighted DOE's unique and extensive data-management needs as a foundation of mission-inspired systems biology research. These needs require a principal GTL data resource, the GKB, with critical links to complementary systems supported by other agencies and community organizations worldwide. This knowledgebase would facilitate a new level of scientific inquiry by serving as a central component for the integration of modeling, simulation, experimentation, and bioinformatic approaches. The GKB also would be a primary resource for data sharing and information exchange among the GTL community. Furthermore, not only would the GKB allow scientists to expand, compute, and integrate data and information program wide, it also would drive two classes of work: experimental design and modeling and simulation. Integrating data derived from computational predictions and modeling, as envisioned in the knowledgebase project, would increase data completeness, fidelity, and accuracy. These advancements in turn would greatly improve modeling and simulation, leading to new experimentation, analyses, and mechanistic insight. Scientists' ever-increasing exploitation of the dynamic linkages among data integration, experimentation, and modeling and simulation--aided by the GKB--will advance efforts to achieve a predictive understanding of the functions of biological systems. The knowledgebase, therefore, must serve multiple roles, including (1) a repository of data and results from high-throughput experiments; (2) a collection of tools to derive new insights through data synthesis, analysis, and comparison; (3) a framework to test scientific understanding; (4) a heuristic capability to improve the value and sophistication of further inquiry; and (5) a foundation for prediction, design, manipulation, and, ultimately, engineering of biological systems to meet national needs in bioenergy, environmental remediation, and carbon cycling."--Executive summary.

Carbon sequestration research and development ( Book )
2 editions published in 1999 in English and held by 177 libraries worldwide

Communicating the future best practices for communication of science and technology to the public : conference proceedings, March 6-8, 2002 ( Book )
1 edition published in 2002 in English and held by 174 libraries worldwide

U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science ( Book )
6 editions published between 2009 and 2010 in English and held by 172 libraries worldwide

Systems biology knowledgebase for a new era in biology executive summary ( Book )
1 edition published in 2009 in English and held by 172 libraries worldwide

CRD report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ( Serial )
in English and held by 156 libraries worldwide

NERSC news by National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (U.S.) ( Serial )
in English and held by 155 libraries worldwide

Computing sciences news by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ( Serial )
in English and held by 135 libraries worldwide

DOE Office of Science American Recovery & Reinvestment Act newsletter ( Serial )
in English and held by 134 libraries worldwide