Biosciences

A CONVERSATION WITH NATHALIE ELISABETH

Nathalie Elisabeth, a project scientist with the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division, hails from Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean. She has travelled all over the world for her academic and research career, from the Caribbean to France to the Indian Ocean to Austria, before landing at Berkeley Lab almost three years ago. She is also a busy and devoted mom of an active five year old.

What is your area of work?

My interest is in host-microbe interactions, because no organism is isolated from others. Interactions with microbes are ubiquitous and important to understand; they have an impact on the environment and play a key role in human health. For example, human gut microbiota are helpful in nutrition and in building immunity, and they even have an influence on mental health.

Plants also interact with microbes, which can help them extract nutrients from the soil, grow, and even resist drought. My particular interest is in using imaging tools to better understand plants and their interactions with beneficial microbes.

What big challenge are you hoping to solve with your scientific research in the next 20 years?

One of the big challenges for humanity is the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. This is important because in 2040, the population in the U.S. will be 373 million; the population on our planet will grow to nine billion. Demand for energy will increase. Today, the U.S. relies mainly on fossil fuels. We need to find other ways. We need to transition to cleaner and renewable energy sources in ways that will provide environmental sustainability and environmental justice. We need to leave a world in which the next generations can have a similar quality of life as we do.

One way to produce cleaner energy and achieve net-zero carbon emission by 2050 is to use plants as feedstock for biofuels production. I hope to contribute to knowledge on the interactions between biomass plants and microbes that share their environments.

What steps are you taking today to accomplish this vision?

Increasing knowledge about plant-microbe interactions can help increase the productivity of plants for biofuels feedstock. I am now leading an LDRD project to visualize microbes in the root environment from the community level down to the single cell level, and to examine how microbes interact with each other and with plants. We use a range of technologies for this project, including cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). I hope that this work will help us understand microbes’ impact on the stability of the plant system and its functioning.

Who do you partner with at the Lab to bring this vision to life?

One of the things I love the most about the Lab is its highly collaborative culture. I always get positive responses to my queries from researchers in various areas. I work closely with Tomas Tyml who is a postdoc on this project. I also work with Na Ji and Karen Davies in MBIB, Esther Singer and Elizabeth Carpenter in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, Yasuo Yoshikuni, Bing Wang, and Jean-Marie Volland at the Joint Genome Institute, and Hoi-Ying Holman (MBIB), who runs infrared radiation beamlines at the Advanced Light Source. I also partner with non-research staff, including resource analyst Karen Louie on budgets, Human Resources on postdoc staffing, and EHS and other members of Lab Operations. Many people are helping to support the research and I am grateful for that. The Biosciences Area’s Strategic Programs Development Group will also be a partner of choice to bring this vision to life.

What would you like the future of science to look like?

I believe that science should be inclusive; everybody can play a role in tackling the world’s challenges. In 2020, I was pleased to see two women receive the Nobel Prize and in 2021, the first woman of color became the Vice President of the U.S. In the future, I would like to see more women of color in science. I try to promote STEM as much as I can so everyone feels they can be a part of the solution, no matter their background.