The game where one has to guess how many jelly beans or marbles can fill a jar should never be played with the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. By some estimates, in a single liter of water as many as 100 million cells of this tiny bacterium can be found. These important organisms serve as the base of… [Read More]

For soil microbiology, it is the best of times. While no one has undertaken an accurate census, a spoonful of soil holds hundreds of billions of microbial cells, encompassing thousands of species. “It’s one of the most diverse microbial habitats on Earth, yet we know surprisingly little about the identities and functions of the microbes… [Read More]

Duckweed is a tiny floating plant that’s been known to drive people daffy. It’s one of the smallest and fastest-growing flowering plants that often becomes a hard-to-control weed in ponds and small lakes. But it’s also been exploited to clean contaminated water and as a source to produce pharmaceuticals. Now, the genome of Greater Duckweed… [Read More]

Ocean sponge-dwelling bacteria have hidden talents. The kidney-red coral reef sponge, Theonella swinhoei, is a source of several anti-fungal and anti-cancer drug candidates. These compounds aren’t produced by the sponge itself, but by symbiotic bacteria that live inside it. The compounds in question are called polyketides, secondary metabolites that happen to be made by just two… [Read More]

Amborella trichopoda, a sprawling shrub that grows on just a single island in the remote South Pacific, is the only plant in its family and genus. It is also one of the oldest flowering plants, having branched off from others about 200 million years ago. Now, researchers from Indiana University, with the U.S. Department of… [Read More]

Glomeromycota is an ancient lineage of fungi that has a symbiotic relationship with roots that goes back nearly 420 million years to the earliest plants. More than two thirds of the world’s plants depend on this soil-dwelling symbiotic fungus to survive, including critical agricultural crops such as wheat, cassava, and rice. The analysis of the… [Read More]

Cyanobacteria, found in just about every ecosystem on Earth, are one of the few bacteria that can create their own energy through photosynthesis and “fix” carbon – from carbon dioxide molecules – and convert it into fuel inside of miniscule compartments called carboxysomes. Using a pioneering visualization method, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley,… [Read More]

Genomic variation is a feature of all natural populations and is vitally important in order to survive changes in their environments. Genetic variation among individuals, to which DNA recombination is an important contributor, is passed from parents to offspring and helps explain that different individuals in the population may harbor a diverse set of traits…. [Read More]

From the depths of ocean dead zones, to wide swaths of forests, and rising up to the troposphere, where most weather changes occur, the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) 2014 Community Science Program portfolio seeks to parse functional information extracted from complex ecosystems to address urgent energy and environmental challenges.  These… [Read More]

Sequestered in Antarctica’s Vestfold Hills, Deep Lake became isolated from the ocean 3,500 years ago by the Antarctic continent rising, resulting in a saltwater ecosystem that remains liquid in extreme cold, and providing researchers a unique niche for studying the evolution of the microbes that now thrive under such conditions. Deep Lake’s microscopic inhabitants are… [Read More]