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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]

Microbial dark matter study in The Scientist

“Its scale and impact are exactly what Nature is there for,” [said Argonne National Laboratory’s Jack Gilbert.] “The data allow us to confirm some known relationships, but also uncovered some awesome new ones.” Read more in The Scientist [Read More]

Microbial dark matter study in Nature

“This is an astounding paper,” says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado–Boulder. “The achievement of hundreds of genome sequences from single cells at a shot is an entirely new level of microbiology.” Read more in Nature [Read More]

Microbial dark matter study in BBC News

“For almost 20 years now we have been astonished by how little there is known about massive regions of the tree of life. This project is the first systematic effort to address this enormous knowledge gap.” – Phil Hugenholtz, director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University of Queensland, in Australia Read more in… [Read More]

Microbial dark matter study in The Globe and Mail

“Sakinaw Lake’s hidden depths have become part of a massive effort to explore some of the least understood branches of the tree of life. “It’s a really interesting place to look for exotic microorganisms,” said Steven Hallam, an environment genomicist at the University of British Columbia.” Read more in The Globe and Mail [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]

Ehux pangenome project in San Diego Union-Tribune

The algae are the third most abundant phytoplankton, and are a key component of the ocean food chain, nourishing animals including crustaceans, shellfish and other filter feeders.They’re characterized by their intricate shells, composed of interwoven lattices of calcium carbonate.“We kind of think of them as flowers of the ocean,” Read said. Read the full story… [Read More]

Ehux pangenome project in redOrbit

 “The Ehux genome is incredibly variable,” said study co-author Dr. Uwe John and biologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). “For example, if the genetic information of two humans is compared, an agreement of about 99 per cent is found. However, if, for example, we take two Ehux strains from… [Read More]

DOE Early Career Awardee’s work to involve DOE JGI collaboration

O’Malley’s research, which she recently presented at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society, involves the use of anaerobic gut fungi from horses, sheep, and other large herbivores to convert the cellulose in plants into sugars. Nature has evolved these fungi to break through lignin, a tough biopolymer that surrounds cellulose, and convert that… [Read More]

Peach genome project in Biofuels Digest

In California, the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) is working to isolate the “evergreen” locus in peaches, which extends the growing season of the plant. Said Daniel Rokhsar, head of the DOE JGI Eukaryotic Program, “In theory, it could be manipulated in poplar to increase the accumulation of biomass.” Peach genes… [Read More]