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Discovering diversity, one cell at a time

The game where one has to guess how many jelly beans or marbles can fill a jar should never be played with the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. By some estimates, in a single liter of water as many as 100 million cells of this tiny bacterium can be found. These important organisms serve as the base of… [Read More]

Deciphering the virulence of a fern fungus

Researchers annotate genome of the smallest known fungal plant pathogen. The Science: Researchers sequenced and analyzed the genome of Mixia osmundea, the smallest fungal plant pathogen (13.6 million bases) to date, to provide insight into its mode of pathogenicity and reproductive biology. The Impact: Aside from learning how the fungal pathogen reproduces, genome annotation revealed… [Read More]

Microbes in Antarctic lake divvy up the waters

Recently sequenced microbes living in Deep Lake are mostly specialists, cornering different niches in the lake ecosystem The Science: Four microbes dominate in the Antarctica’s Deep Lake, making up 70% of the microbial community. They belong to a group called haloarchaea that require high salt concentrations to grow and are naturally adapted to extreme conditions… [Read More]

Great Prairie soil study in Biomass magazine

“During the study, MSU researchers sought to compare the microbial populations of different soils sampled from sites that were once native prairie with 100 years of agricultural cultivation. The experiment yielded nearly 400 billion letters of code, which amounts to more than 130 human genome equivalents.” Learn more about the complexities of soil and then… [Read More]

Microbial dark matter study in Wired

“The idea was to go after underrepresented branches of microbial diversity – so-called Microbial Dark Matter – for which additional information would have a disproportionately large effect on the tree’s overall shape. In pursuit of these recluses, Rinke and his colleagues sampled nine different habitats that were likely to house exotic or otherwise overlooked organisms:… [Read More]

Yellowstone Hot Springs: A Hotbed of Microbial Life

[Note: This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2013 issue of the JGI Primer.] Life on Earth finds a way to survive almost anywhere there is a source of energy to support it. In Yellowstone National Park (YNP), this phenomenon is in the extreme by microorganisms that thrive in harsh, acidic hot springs found unsuitable… [Read More]

Microbial dark matter study in Treehugger

“Space comes to mind as the last frontier for finding new forms of life, but we still have not explored all of the planet on which we are living. Biologists venture to places both extreme and mundane in the quest to learn more about Earth. Courtesy of the DOE Joint Genome Institute, here is a photo… [Read More]

Advancing soybean science on Iowa Public Radio

““It’s amazing to see the explosion that’s gone on in the plant world,” said Jeremy Schmutz, a plant genomicist at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in California and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Alabama. In 2010, his team completed the soybean genome sequence, which is a roadmap that shows every piece of soybean DNA.”… [Read More]

Microbial “who done it?” in R&D magazine

“One of the keys to commercialization of advanced biofuels is the development of cost-competitive ways to extract fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. The use of enzymes from thermophiles—microbes that thrive at extremely high temperatures and alkaline conditions—holds promise for achieving this. Finding the most effective of these microbial enzymes, however, has been a challenge. That… [Read More]

Microbial dark matter project in Science

“Three years ago, Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and colleagues decided to head into this uncharted territory by applying a newly developed sequencing approach to bacteria and archaea. Until recently, determining a genome’s makeup required many copies of the DNA, and thus only microbes grown in the… [Read More]