EMSL Launching New Community Campaigns to Tackle Large Challenges in Biological and Environmental Sciences
Campaigns to feature greater community input and focused scopes to support "big science" achievements
The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory is introducing community science campaigns to connect research communities to advancing biological and environmental challenges. (Photo by Maegan Murray | Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory)
*Updated Oct. 22, 2025
The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) is launching a series of new community science campaigns that leverage the collective power of the research community to tackle significant biological and environmental challenges faced in creating an energy-secure future.
A few of these challenges include finding and processing new sources of critical minerals, creating versatile new bioproducts to augment conventional resources, and understanding emergent processes that can impact infrastructure resilience.
Through these campaigns, EMSL will develop capabilities to support the Department of Energy Office of Science research priorities using EMSL’s expertise in three science areas:
- Functional and Systems Biology (FSB)
- Environmental Transformations and Interactions (ETI)
- Computing, Analytics, and Modeling (CAM)
EMSL director Douglas Mans said over the past five years, EMSL has made large investments in each of its science areas, focusing on bringing multidisciplinary, big-scale science capabilities to the forefront.
“As these advances have been deployed into the EMSL user program, the time has now come to refine how these capabilities are deployed in collaboration with the broader research community to tackle DOE big science challenges,” he said.
Mans said with the help of the scientific community, EMSL can use community science campaigns to elevate what is possible through each of its science areas.
“These campaigns are intended to bring together researchers with a wide variety of expertise to tackle the same strategically identified challenges that are bigger than what an individual principal investigator or small team research effort can accomplish alone," he said.
Science and community at the core of each campaign
Each community science campaign will focus on a particular science challenge or set of challenges captured in EMSL’s three science areas that align to and advance DOE-BER and national science mission priorities. Areas for community collaboration within each campaign are identified during one or more community science meetings held throughout the year.
Each community science meeting invites the feedback and contributions of researchers throughout the scientific community (academia, government, and industry). Meeting participants are asked to provide comments on science challenges within identified areas of interest, ideal capabilities and workflows, as well as specific science goals and objectives to tackle the challenges. These goals and objectives will seed the formation of teams and the research to be conducted at EMSL. The intent is to grow multidisciplinary “teams of teams” that that span academia, government, and industry, to analyze data and advance knowledge in the areas selected during the community science meetings. The data produced will be open to the community.
“The feedback and contributions from our scientific community are vital to the success of these campaigns,” Mans said. “You, as our scientific community, help ensure that we’re tackling the right challenges with the right capabilities and resources. Your contributions in the field, and in the lab, will provide the resources needed to address large science challenges on a scale that wasn’t possible before.”
EMSL’s science areas result in deep wins for the science community
The goal of EMSL’s three science areas is to deliver transformational research and development and improvement of capabilities to address BER science that facilitates a deep functional understanding of complex biological and environmental systems across scales, Mans said.
“With a deeper functional understanding of biological and environmental systems, we can identify better ways to develop efficient and abundant energy resources, advance the bioeconomy for critical U.S. materials supply chains, as well as ensure resilient economic and energy infrastructure,” he said.
Within the last few years as part of the ETI science area, EMSL launched soil sampling proposal calls through its Molecular Observation Network (MONet) that welcomed samples from across the continental United States. As a result, the project introduced a standardized set of molecular-level soil data and the associated open portal, where researchers can access AI-ready data for soils across multiple ecoregions.
Through EMSL's FSB science area, researchers are developing several autonomous science platforms as part of the Digital Phenome project that characterize the phenome of biological organisms present within environmental systems—specifically microbes. Systems currently under development include the Automated Microbial Phenotyping Platform and the Microbial Molecular Phenotyping Capability—a future fully automated phenotyping laboratory extension of EMSL. The focus on automation provides a path to work toward an autonomous science capability with the user community in the future.
Through the CAM science area, EMSL is developing open-source, agentic-based, AI systems enabling automation in scientific workflows. These systems expedite experimental design and scientific discovery by supporting an unprecedented scale of data integration and model–experiment (ModEx) integration.
“The next step in the evolution in each of these science areas is inviting the scientific community’s feedback in how we can one, grow and accelerate scientific discovery in these areas, and two, identify and apply these capabilities to tackle our hardest science problems for DOE and the nation,” Mans said.
Campaigns launching now and within the next few months
As a result of previous community science meetings and feedback, EMSL has identified a few campaigns that are in progress or will launch in the next few months.
Functional & Systems Biology:
- 1,000 Fungal Proteins
- Harnessing Microbial Production to Advance Bioeconomy and Biotechnology (Microbial Bioeconomy)
- Discovery and Characterization of Critical Metal-Binding Small Molecules and Proteins (Metal-Binding Biomolecules)
Environmental Transformations & Interactions:
- Soil Organic Indicators at Large Scale for Artificial Intelligence (SOILS-AI)
- Supporting Energy–Human–Earth System Modeling (Soils PacWest)
- Critical Minerals Biogeochemistry in the Rhizosphere – Ultramafic Soils (Rhizo Critical)
- Biogeochemical processes governing critical mineral recovery in mineral dominated systems (Unconventional Critical)
Computing, Analytics, and Modeling:
- More information coming soon
More information will be shared in the coming months about campaign timelines, including how to participate in community science meetings.
For more information on each of EMSL’s science areas and to participate in current and future campaigns, visit the following pages: