According to the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), global cocoa bean production in 2017-2018 was 4.6 million metric tons. The global chocolate brands couldn’t exist without cocoa.  But today the plant is under threat due to climate change and devastating fungal infections. That’s why Mars, Inc., a maker of chocolate for more than 100 years and… [Read More]

Notes from the JGI 2019 User Meeting The Arctic peatlands are among the northern ecosystems that collectively store up to half of the planet’s soil carbon. With the frozen peatlands thawing, said Virginia Rich of The Ohio State University, “if we project this out, permafrost is virtually eliminated by the end of the century.” Just… [Read More]

Notes from the JGI 2019 User Meeting Amanda Hurley, a postdoctoral fellow in Jo Handelsman’s lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, began her talk with a reminder that pathogens damage 16% of the global crop yield. That number is expected to rise due to climate change. “We need something that tips the scales back in… [Read More]

In a special issue of mSystems, out May 14, 2019, JGI researchers are among the authors who offer perspectives on what the next five years of innovation could look like. In one article, Micro-Scale Applications head Rex Malmstrom and Metagenome Program head Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh outline more targeted approaches to reconstruct individual microbes in an environmental… [Read More]

Twice a year, the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program awards graduate students the opportunity to pursue part of their thesis research at one of the DOE national laboratories or national user facilities. As a result of the latest call, a total of 70 graduate students from 52 universities were selected to… [Read More]

Puerto Nuevo is a small town along the Baja California coastline in Mexico. While conducting early field studies related to her thesis on cone snails, UC Merced graduate student Sabah Ul-Hasan and alumnus of the JGI-UC Merced Genomics Internship Program, first sampled the area in summer 2016.  She described the microbial diversity patterns of Puerto… [Read More]

The latest edition of the JGI Progress Report highlights notable research and scientific collaborations in 2018. The cover is an image of Mono Lake, a saline soda lake east of California’s Yosemite National Park, taken by JGI’s own Jon Bertsch. Microbes isolated from Mono Lake were sequenced by the JGI (isolates here, here and here),… [Read More]

Metagenome-assembled archaeal genomes provide new insights into an ancient metabolism. Methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Billions of years ago, methane-producing archaea likely played a key role in determining the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and regulating the global climate for life to flourish. For Guillaume Borrel and Simonetta… [Read More]

Mini-Metagenomics Approach Helps Identify Novel Archaeal Methane Metabolism. Methane-producing archaea are estimated to produce 500 million tons of methane a year, which is over half the total global methane production. They are thought to use billions of tons of the carbon dioxide trapped in biomass each year to do so. As such, they are considered… [Read More]

Submit proposals focused on the bioinformatics community by March 1st. WHEN: May 6-10, 2019 WHERE: JGI With DOE investments in graphical processing unit (GPU)-based high-performance computing resources, an upcoming hackathon led by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), NVIDIA, and the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science… [Read More]