“At the dawn of the third decade of microbial genomics, and well into the information age, the establishment of a national microbiome data center can pave the way to understanding the Earth’s microbiome.” –Nikos Kyrpides Following the June 2017 ASM Microbe Town Hall on “Envisioning a National Microbiome Data Collaborative,” everyone interested is encouraged to… [Read More]

Congratulations to Nikos Kyrpides, JGI’s Prokaryote Super Program head, who was recently selected as the 2018 USFCC/J. Roger Porter Award recipient by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). This award recognizes outstanding efforts by a scientist who has demonstrated the importance of microbial biodiversity through sustained curatorial or stewardship activities for a major resource by… [Read More]

2017 Summer Interns Share Highlights of their time at JGI In 2017, JGI hosted 15 summer interns ranging from high schoolers through graduate school. Many of the students came to the JGI through ongoing partnerships dedicated toward training the next generation of scientific talent. Two of the high school students are among the Biotech Partners… [Read More]

Letters of Intent are being solicited for the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) Emerging Technologies Opportunity Program (ETOP) 2018 award. Potential offerors must electronically submit a Letter of Intent through the DOE JGI’s proposal submission system. Letters of Intent need to be received by August 30, 2017. For examples of accepted ETOP proposals,… [Read More]

On May 11, 2017, NASA astronaut and microbiologist Kate Rubins, the first woman to sequence DNA in space, gave a talk about “Science in Extreme Environments” at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Among the anecdotes she shared about living and working in space for nearly 4 months was one on how mundane bench tasks… [Read More]

With the topic “Doing Science in Space: At 17,500 miles per hour and 250 miles up,” NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins will be speaking at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on Thursday, May 11, 2017. A livestream of the talk will be available for Berkeley Lab staff here. This visit is co-hosted by the Molecular Foundry and the… [Read More]

On January 31 at Berkeley Lab, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB) that will be the home of DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and DOE Systems Knowledgebase (KBase) in 2019. Flanked by dignitaries representing the Berkeley Lab, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and the University of California, incoming… [Read More]

“Using the single-celled sequencing techniques that she had perfected at the Joint Genome Institute, Woyke and her colleagues ended up with exactly 201 genomes from these candidate phyla, representing 29 branches on the tree of life that scientists knew nothing about. ‘For many phyla, this was the first genomic data anyone had seen,’ she says.”… [Read More]

“Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is an unlikely model for plant evolution, but is a useful one because it has undergone major habitat shifts: it evolved from marine algae into a terrestrial flowering plant, then moved back to the sea again.” Among the 10 papers that were included the Editors’ Choice list of the Nature journal is the… [Read More]

“Microbiologists often seek life in the planet’s extremes — from below ice sheets to within geysers. But Appalachian Basin scientists found hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, also provides its own inhabited extremes in their backyard.” In Discover magazine’s list of top 100 science stories of 2016 is a study from The Ohio State University researchers that led… [Read More]