Instrumentation and Facilities
ORNL provides an exceptional environment for carrying out the proposed research on plant-microbe interfaces, including cutting-edge resources in plant biology, microbiology, analytical technologies, and computational sciences. Some of these state-of-the-art facilities and related equipment as well as researcher program affiliations available for this research are included below.
APPL The Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory (APPL) is a unique plant phenotyping system at ORNL. It provides high-resolution data to accelerate fundamental science investigations—connecting genotypes to phenotypes and offers one of the most diverse suites of imaging capabilities for plant phenotyping worldwide. Integrating these capabilities with the wealth of genomic data on plants and microbes enables new avenues for scientific discovery.
CNMS The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at ORNL offers the national and international user community access to staff expertise and state-of-the-art equipment for a broad range of nanoscience research, including nanomaterials synthesis, nanofabrication, imaging/microscopy/characterization, and theory/modeling/simulation.
CBI The Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) is a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary research organization focused on accelerating domestication of bioenergy-relevant plants and microbes to enable high-impact, value-added, co-product development at multiples points in the bioenergy supply chain.
KBase The Department of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) is a software and data science platform designed to meet the grand challenge of systems biology: predicting and designing biological function. KBase is the first large-scale data science platform that enables users to upload their own data, analyze it alongside collaborator and public data, build increasingly realistic models, and share and publish reproducible workflows and conclusions.
NCCS The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) provides state-of-the-art computational and data science infrastructure and home to the HPE Cray EX Frontier, the fastest computer in the world.
The University of Tennessee has two resources affiliated the PMI project:
UT Bredesen Center and UT Graduate School of Genome Science and Technology
Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Group The Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Group at ORNL led by Bob Hettich, focuses on development and deployment of high-performance mass spectrometry techniques for analytical characterization and chemical imaging of non-volatile biomolecules, including proteomes and metabolomes, to address key science questions of interest to a variety of programs supported by the Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health.
Molecular and Cellular Imaging Group The Molecular and Cellular Imaging Group at ORNL led by Jenny Morrell-Falvey, focuses on the characterization, integration, and understanding of natural and synthetic systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. A continuing emphasis is to define how natural systems are organized at the molecular scale and understand how this organization contributes to complex behavior and emergent biological function.
