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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]

Toward a Better Understanding of Soil-Microbe Interactions

In the August 2011 issue of the Journal of Bacteriology, a team of researchers led by DOE JGI’s Patrick Chain at Los Alamos National Laboratory focused on a microbe that can help or harm as the case may be. Ochrobactrum anthropi thrives in a variety of habitats including polluted soil, plants and even higher mammals…. [Read More]

Another Brown Mercury Producer Genome Sequenced

In the August edition of The Journal of Bacteriology, a group of scientists including several DOE JGI researchers and longtime collaborator Judy Wall of the University of Missouri described the genome for Desulfovibrio africanus, a sulfate-reducing bacterium isolated from Namibia that doesn’t require oxygen for its survival. Like the Desulfovibrio species sequenced as recently as… [Read More]

Sweetening the Biofuels Production Process

Currently, converting cellulosic biomass into biofuels is inefficient and costly.  One of the barriers to reducing costs and yields is that xylose, a five-carbon sugar that represents nearly half of available sugars in plant (in the form of hemicellulose), is extremely difficult and time-consuming to break down using enzymes sourced from conventional yeast strains. In… [Read More]

Ethanol Contaminant Could Assist Production Efficiency

An Ethanol plant in Bairstown, Iowa (Courtesy of USDA) In the August edition of The Journal of Bacteriology, researchers led by long-time collaborator David Mills of the University of California Davis, and including DOE JGI’s Alex Copeland, Olga Chertkov and Lynne Goodwin, announced the completed genome sequence of Lactobacillus buchneri and has now been made… [Read More]