Comparative genome analysis provides clues on how climate change might impact evolutionary adaptation limits Diatoms are a common type of photosynthetic microorganism, found in many environments from marine to soil; in the oceans, they are responsible for more than a third of the global ocean carbon captured during photosynthesis. This leads to a significant amount… [Read More]
After a 9-month national search, Nigel Mouncey, currently Research and Development Director for Bioengineering and Bioprocessing at Dow AgroSciences LLC, has been selected as the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. “Nigel brings the perfect set of scientific and management skills as… [Read More]
“Using the single-celled sequencing techniques that she had perfected at the Joint Genome Institute, Woyke and her colleagues ended up with exactly 201 genomes from these candidate phyla, representing 29 branches on the tree of life that scientists knew nothing about. ‘For many phyla, this was the first genomic data anyone had seen,’ she says.”… [Read More]
“Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is an unlikely model for plant evolution, but is a useful one because it has undergone major habitat shifts: it evolved from marine algae into a terrestrial flowering plant, then moved back to the sea again.” Among the 10 papers that were included the Editors’ Choice list of the Nature journal is the… [Read More]
Novel mechanism in bacterial-fungal symbiosis could have biodiesel production applications The Science To answer the challenge of producing renewable, sustainable alternative fuels, researchers aren’t just looking at developing candidate bioenergy crops but are also reviewing other natural sources of energy-dense oils such as fungi. To learn more about how bacteria interact with fungi in a… [Read More]
“Microbiologists often seek life in the planet’s extremes — from below ice sheets to within geysers. But Appalachian Basin scientists found hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, also provides its own inhabited extremes in their backyard.” In Discover magazine’s list of top 100 science stories of 2016 is a study from The Ohio State University researchers that led… [Read More]
The Science In a series of four articles published in the Database issue of the Nucleic Acids Research journal, DOE JGI researchers report on the latest updates to several publicly accessible databases and computational tools that benefit the global community of microbial researchers. One report focuses on a new database dedicated global viral diversity. [Read More]
Six of the DOE JGI’s researchers are among the most highly cited in the world. That’s according to the annual list compiled by Clarivate Analytics, formerly the IP & Science arm of Thomson Reuters. (Click here to see the full list.) The 2016 list focused on Highly Cited Papers (defined in the Methodology section as… [Read More]
At the recently concluded supercomputing conference (SC16), students from the University of Science and Technology of China, who went by “Team SwanGeese,” won the Student Cluster Competition. (Click here to read the SC16 story about the winners.) One of the team’s advisers was JGI’s Zhong Wang, head of the Genome Analysis group. Zhong was tapped to participate by… [Read More]
Despite the vast diversity of organisms on the planet that express enzymes for the conversion of carbon dioxide into such organic compounds as sugars – as plants do through photosynthesis – the efforts to harness these capabilities to transform CO2 into high-value products such as biofuel and renewable chemicals have met with limited success. While… [Read More]