DOE Joint Genome Institute

Our Science
Home › Science Highlights

Microbial response to the thawing Arctic

The frozen Arctic soils keep an estimated 1,672 billion metric tons of carbon out of the Earth’s atmosphere, more than 250 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the United States in the year 2009. Rising global temperatures have led to increasing concerns on the potential impacts of thawing permafrost upon the carbon… [Read More]

A metagenomic approach to analyzing rice endophytes

During the call for 2012 proposals for the DOE JGI’s Community Sequencing Program, one of the areas of focus researchers were asked to consider was that of plant-microbe interactions. Microbes that live in plants or in the rhizosphere where plant roots and soil interact can play crucial roles in plant health. This is of particular… [Read More]

UV treatments for contaminated MDA reagents

  Single cell genomicsis a method used by researchers to get around the research roadblock thrown up by the need for large amounts of microbial DNA in order to do traditional sequencing techniques. In this process, a single cell isolated from an environmental sample is amplified to make millions of copies of the microbial genome… [Read More]

Fungal enzymes to improve biomass pretreatment processes

Many of the enzymes currently being used in the pretreatment processes for cellulosic biofuels production come from species that thrive at temperatures comfortable to humans (68°F-95°F). To speed up this process of converting polysaccharides to fermentable sugars, a goal driven by the nation’s Renewable Fuels Standard requirement that calls for the annual production of 36… [Read More]

Structural Analysis of Cow and Hoatzin Microbial Communities

Inside the guts of many animals, microbes break down the plant fibers ingested as part of their diet. These microbes are of interest to bioenergy researchers who want to learn from nature and apply these cellulosic degradation capabilities toward biofuel production. To this end, at the JGI, several sequencing projects have focused on the microbial… [Read More]

High-temperature enzymes for biomass breakdown

To overcome the challenge of breaking down cellulosic biomass for commercial biofuel production, which involves the application of high temperatures, a team of researchers including DOE JGI’s Martin Allgaier, now at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Germany, and Phil Hugenholtz, now director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University… [Read More]

A mechanism for de novo intron insertion

Introns are the parts of a gene sequence that are not expressed in the protein. In the August 30 issue of Nature Communications, a team led by DOE JGI’s Eukaryote Program head Dan Rokhsar and Uffe Hellsten describe a potential mechanism by which introns have been added to a genome sequence since what they refer… [Read More]

A “meraculous” way to conduct whole-genome assemblies

The dramatic shift in sequencing technologies that allows genome researchers to generate the equivalent of a single human genome in days rather than the decades it took multiple organizations to complete a single one has also shifted the bottleneck from sequence production to sequence assembly. For example, the Sanger platform routinely produced reads 700 basepairs… [Read More]