Providing Access to the Best Biological Tools A unique investment by the state of Tennessee will help ORNL and the University of Tennessee attract some of the world's best biological researchers.

ORNL's modern biological and environmental sciences campus will soon have a new addition: the Joint Institute for Biological Sciences. This joint institute of ORNL and the University of Tennessee, which is scheduled for construction in the spring of 2005, will have a single mission: to enable joint faculty appointees, senior staff scientists, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and UT research associates to perform world-class research in systems biology and biotechnology, taking advantage of ORNL's user facilities and other world-class tools. Both parties expect that some of this research will lead to the founding of new companies, spurring economic development in the region.

Researchers and students at the institute will have access to DOE's existing world-class user facilities at ORNL, including the Russell vivarium, the Free Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment facility, Walker Branch Watershed, the Natural and Accelerated Bioremediation Research Facility, high-performance computing resources at the Center for Computational Sciences, and neutron sources at the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Spallation Neutron Source (which comes on-line in 2006). For characterizing proteins and protein complexes in cells, researchers will also apply ORNL's extensive mass spectrometry instrumentation, neutron scattering and diffraction at HFIR and SNS, X-ray diffraction equipment, and advanced microscopes and other imaging tools.

The institute was conceived as a unique program to encourage multidisciplinary, collaborative research in the biological and environmental sciences. UT and ORNL researchers will specialize in microbial functional genomics, comparative genomics, plant genomics and physiology, biophysical chemistry, nanobiotechnology, bioengineering, structural biology, bioinformatics and computational biology, and ecosystem genomics for environmental change sensing and forecasting.

"This state-of-the-art institute will catalyze world-class interdisciplinary research in modern biology and attract top scientists and engineers to UT and ORNL," says Reinhold Mann, associate laboratory director for biological and environmental sciences. "We will leverage this state investment and partnership to advance biology with applications in clean energy, environmental stewardship, and human health."

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