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Every Day is Earth Day @JGI

More than four decades ago, the first celebration of Earth Day raised the idea of protecting the environment to a greater public awareness. Today, the annual event is a reminder of the longstanding goal to provide a cleaner, healthier and sustainable environment for everyone to live in. Here at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint… [Read More]

The Genomics of Energy & Environment – in Poetry

In honor of National Poetry Month, we’re celebrating an underutilized method of communicating our science: poetry. According to Merriam-Webster, poetry is defined as, “writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.” As proof that science can (and has)… [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]

Leaf-cutter ants project in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“These bacteria and these fungi have evolved for millions of years to deconstruct plant biomass,” said Frank Aylward, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies leaf-cutter ants and their fungus gardens. “We should try to learn from them and find out how it occurs in nature.” Read more at JSOnline.com about this… [Read More]