Biogas is regarded as a clean and renewable energy source and can be produced from a variety of organic feedstocks and livestock manures. In Germany, thousands of biogas plants are producing close to 20 TWh of electricity annually. The process of fermenting biogas from organic material involves multiple microbial interactions. This project focuses on learning… [Read More]

Polyporales represents a species-rich but still poorly studied order of fungi. Many of the species comprise the major group of wood decayers in temperate and tropical forests. Polyporales fungi include brown rot and white rot species that can be selectively exploited for their ability to degrade cellulose, hemicellulose and/or lignin in woody substrates. For example,… [Read More]

Understanding the Rhizidium-Bracteacoccus symbiosis is likely to reveal algal genes, and novel algal culture methods, that can be targeted to increase biomass production for biofuel applications. Rhizidium phycophilum is a terrestrial chytrid isolated from soil originating from an Antarctic beech forest in New South Wales, Australia. Originally isolated from pollen and chitin, R. phycophilum can… [Read More]

The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest and biologically richest rainforest, and it plays an essential role in global ecological processes, sequestering more carbon than any other ecosystem on Earth. The deforestation of the rainforest and its conversion into agricultural lands results in an estimated annual loss of 1.6 Petagrams C (1.6 billion kg) of… [Read More]

A major, recognized roadblock in conversion of biomass to fuels and chemicals is the presence of inhibitory compounds which render the sugar streams unusable. These inhibitors are commonly present in lignocellulosic biomass that has been subjected to physical and chemical pretreatment for release of sugars. The fungus Coniochaeta ligniaria has been shown to be tolerant… [Read More]

Forests depend on tree-microbial associations above and below ground. Understanding molecular mechanisms of associations between trees and fungi in forests requires a novel, community-driven, multi-disciplinary approach based on genomics and ecological data and tools. This project focuses on a set of mycorrhizal fungal species able to form several types of plant-fungus symbioses and selected for… [Read More]

The DOE JGI launched The Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) project in 2007 as a pilot study with the objective of sequencing about 170 bacterial and archaeal genomes. In 2011 and 2012, the project was extended through the Community Sequencing Program, first to sequence 250 genomes and then, through the Genomic Encyclopedia of… [Read More]

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]