Blog Archives - DOE Joint Genome Institute

April 29, 2020

JGI Earth Month: The Unusual Metabolism That Helps Plants Withstand Drought

For JGI Earth Month, Karolina Heyduk, an evolutionary plant biologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa shares how crassulacean acid metabolism, or CAM, helps plants take the heat. [Read More]

April 28, 2020

JGI Earth Month: Wetlands Work in #TenHundredWords

For JGI Earth Month, graduate student Mo Kaze took on the challenge of explaining her research using the ten hundred most commonly used words in the English language. Her work focuses anthropogenic impacts on wetland microbiome composition and metabolism. The #TenHundredWords Challenge was inspired by Randall Munroe’s xkcd comic “Up Goer Five” and his subsequent book Thing Explainer. [Read More]

April 22, 2020

JGI Earth Month: Lessons in Nature’s Resilience

As part of JGI Earth Month, revisiting lessons in Nature’s resilience resulting from studies by Berkeley Lab researchers, including JGI scientists, to understand how the microbial communities in the waters responded to the influx of oil. [Read More]

April 21, 2020

JGI Earth Month: Healthy Streams, Nutritious Microbes?

As part of JGI Earth Month, hear from Ed Hall, an ecologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He’s investigating how microbes in the Arkansas River might be influencing the river’s health. [Read More]

April 14, 2020

JGI Earth Month: Kjiersten Fagnan Reflects on Shelter-in-Place Effects

In this brief captioned video, JGI Chief Informatics Officer Kjiersten Fagnan reflects on the personal and environmental impacts of the shelter-in-place order as part of JGI Earth Month. [Read More]

February 21, 2020

Tanja Woyke Elected to American Academy of Microbiology

JGI’s Tanja Woyke has been elected to the American Academy of Microbiology, joining 67 other new Fellows in the Class of 2020. Fellows are selected based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology. [Read More]

February 4, 2020

JGI Scientists Pen Genome Watch Articles

JGI researchers are sharing their expertise in environmental genomics by writing for the column Genome Watch in Nature Reviews Microbiology. In 2018. Tanja Woyke, who leads the Microbial Program at the JGI, received a message from Andrea Du Toit, senior editor for Nature Reviews Microbiology, with an unusual opportunity: would JGI researchers consider regularly writing for the magazine’s column Genome Watch? [Read More]

December 23, 2019

Expanding Virophage Diversity

Virophages are small viruses with double-stranded DNA genomes that co-infect eukaryotic cells along with giant viruses. Almost all known virophage genomes share only four genes in common: major and minor capsid proteins (MCP and mCP, respectively), ATPase involved in DNA packaging, and PRO, a cysteine protease involved in capsid maturation. Recently reported in Microbiome, researchers… [Read More]

December 23, 2019

Honey Bee Gut Microbiota Divvy Up Dinner

Scientists find bee gut microbes have a division of labor when it comes to metabolizing complex polysaccharides. Honey bees are invaluable pollinators — cupids of the plant world facilitating the remixing of genes in the next generation of flowering vegetation. In return for their services, bees eat plant nectar and pollen. Nectar is an easily… [Read More]

December 10, 2019

10 From JGI on the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers List

Clarivate Analytics, formerly the IP & Science arm of Thomson Reuters, has released their 2019 list of Highly Cited Researchers, which includes 10 affiliated with the JGI . The 2019 list focused on Highly Cited Papers, defined in the Methodology section as “those that rank in the top 1% by citations for papers published and… [Read More]