Kasey Markel and Patrick Shih (UC Berkeley and the Joint BioEnergy Institute) are looking for new ways to engineer plants. So they’ve looked into wasps that program oak trees to raise their young in structures called galls. In this episode, hear from Kasey and Patrick about how this project unfolded, and how they worked with the JGI’s metabolomics program to find out more about these weird little pods. [Read More]

To engineer yeast to do more, and understand genomes in general, Jef Boeke, Weimin Zhang (NYU Langone Health) and Leslie Mitchell (Neochromosome) have worked to replace yeast’s native chromosomes with synthetic versions. This project has turned out to be an international collaboration, with some artistic endeavors along the way. Eventually, the goal is to create an entirely human-generated yeast genome. [Read More]

Three stories of JGI-supported research, connected to nutrient cycles. Francis Martin and Lucas Auer discuss their work on the community of forest floor fungi. Allison Joy looks into seagrass meadows’ carbon sequestration with insights from Adam Healey and Xiao Ma. And Karen Serrano and Benjamin Cole explain their research on the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots. [Read More]

This is the third and final episode of our series on a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. In the last two episodes, we’ve covered the specialized software and supercomputers behind this project. But every part of this project depends on lakewater samples — so this episode is a look at how researchers get these specialized snapshots of a freshwater ecosystem. [Read More]

This series is the story of a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. In this episode: a look at the supercomputing that stitches together large datasets with the assembler program MetaHipMer2. Oak Ridge National Lab is home to two supercomputers — Summit and Frontier — that process terabytes of data with MetaHipMer2. But nearby the JGI, a cluster called Dori is also capable of running smaller MetaHipMer assemblies — so we head there for a sense of what this supercomputing looks like. [Read More]