Plant pathogens pose a major threat to sustainable bioenergy production. A better understanding of how pathogens cause disease and how plants defend themselves is essential to protect biofuel crops in the future. Recently, the genomes of many bioenergy crops and their fungal pathogens have been sequenced, which provides unprecedented resources to study the genetic basis… [Read More]

The growing demand for energy and the subsequent consequences of energy use for the environmental condition of the biosphere is a major challenge facing the world. Most climate scientists believe that continually rising levels of carbon dioxide emissions release will result in severe alterations to weather, especially temperature and precipitation, with potentially dramatic impacts on… [Read More]

The Arctic is characterized by vast amounts of carbon stored in permafrost and a rapidly evolving landscape and is thus an important focal point for the study of climate change. High latitudes have experienced the greatest regional warming in recent decades and are projected to warm twice as much as the rest of the globe… [Read More]

The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) observed that the ocean is becoming significantly warmer, fresher and more acidic. Researchers want to understand how marine microbial communities are responding to the changes that are increasing oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) or “dead zones” around the world. Since OMZs account for up… [Read More]

Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant growth, second only to nitrogen in terms of crop nutrient requirements. Compared with other nutrients, phosphorus is the least mobile and available to plants in most soils. New agricultural practices are needed to provide this essential nutrient for production of food and energy crops while sustaining the environment…. [Read More]

The model filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa colonizes freshly burned plant material and shows robust growth on cellulosic material. Filamentous fungi are of interest to bioenergy researchers because they provide insights into improving plant cell wall deconstruction, which could be useful for second-generation biofuels production. Through a systems biology approach, researchers hope to harness the genomic… [Read More]

The only existing complete genomes available from marine ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA) were isolated from a tropical aquarium and the other an obligate sponge symbiont. Although the genomes of these organisms have been extremely valuable to the field, neither organism is truly representative of abundant planktonic (water column) AOA found in the ocean. Studies suggest there… [Read More]

The Functional Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (FEBA) is an effort to develop a pipeline for microbial functional annotation in order to help bridge the gap between sequencing microbial genomes and characterizing the genes encoded by these genomes. Many of the microbial species being studied in this pilot project have direct relevance to DOE missions… [Read More]

Most freshwater systems are net carbon dioxide emitters due to the processing of terrestrial carbon. Globally this amounts to an estimated total of 1.9 Petagrams (nearly 2 billion kilograms) terrestrial carbon per year, nearly half of which is emitted. This number is of the same order of magnitude as the net ecosystem productivity of the… [Read More]

The western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) ecosystem is one of the most sensitive environments to climate change, having experienced an increase in mean air temperatures of 2–3°Celsius over the past 50 years. It is not surprising that WAP waters are warming as well. Efforts are underway to understand how this warming will alter the ecology of… [Read More]