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Chlorella for the carbon cycle and biodiesel production

Green algae are key components of the global carbon cycle and help sequester half of the carbon in the atmosphere. From a bioenergy perspective, algae are increasingly viewed as a viable feedstock for biofuel and biodiesel production because of their high lipid content. However, algal viruses can infect up to a fifth of all algae… [Read More]

Leaf-cutter ant microbiome breaks down plant biomass

Leaf-cutter ants are community gardeners on a very large scale. Living in colonies composed of several millions, the ants harvest hundreds of kilograms of leaves annually and use them to cultivate fungal gardens that serve as their primary food source. Leaf-cutter ant. (From the October 2010 issue of PLoS Genetics. Image by Jarrod J. Scott,… [Read More]

A bacterium for breaking down dioxins

Isolated from the River Elbe in Germany, Sphingomonas wittichii RW 1 belongs to a family of bacteria that play a role in breaking down complex aromatic compounds associated with decaying plant mater and chemical pollution. S. wittichii itself is capable of completely breaking down toxic dioxin pollutants, and was selected for sequencing by the DOE… [Read More]

New clues for understanding a novel cellulolytic process

Fibrobacter succinogenes is an anaerobic bacterium that breaks down plant cell wall biomass in ruminants and converts the cellulose into glucose. Sequenced at the DOE JGI for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the 3.8 million base genome was completed and the information submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information in late 2009…. [Read More]

Bacterial lessons in rare metal recovery

One of the goals of the DOE’s Genomics:GTL Program is understanding how microbes and microbial communities perform the functions that have helped them thrive in a wide variety of environments and which have applications in the DOE mission areas of bioenergy, carbon cycling and biogeochemistry. British scientists applied information gleaned from Desulfovibrio genomes sequenced by… [Read More]

Standardizing metagenomic classifications

A five-tier metagenome classification system would  enable genomic researchers to better extract and understand data. (Image from Ivanova et al. Env Microbiol. 2010: 12(7):1803-1805.) Studying the genomes of microbial communities, or metagenomics, has been facilitated in the last few years by advances in sequencing technologies. However, as the DOE JGI’s Natalia Ivanova, Susannah Tringe, Dino… [Read More]

A bacterium for biohydrogen production

Breaking down organic wastes typically involves microbial communities of bacteria and archaea working in concert with methanogens, which remove the hydrogen generated during the degradation process. The interactions between these syntrophic communities are being studied to understand the roles these microbes play individually and and as whole. In the August 2010 issue of the journal… [Read More]

Updating Genomics and Bioinformatics Courses for Undergraduates

Responding to the National Research Council of the National Academies’ call to “involve students in working with real data and tolls that reflect the nature of life sciences research in the 21st century,” the DOE JGI’s Education Program, headed by Cheryl Kerfeld, collaborated with faculty members from several universities around the country to develop bioinformatics… [Read More]

Terephthalate-degrading consortia

Terepthalate is the byproduct of a common compound used extensively by the plastics industry. The volume of terephthalate wastewater generated is equivalent to the amount of wastewater generated by 20 million people. Syntrophic communities are composed of bacteria that break down organic matter and methanogens that remove the hydrogen released to ensure the degradation process… [Read More]

Tammar wallaby foregut microbiome

Australia and New Zealand were separated from other land masses for millennia, and the unique marsupials found there such as kangaroos and wallabies have forestomachs adapted to efficiently break down lignocellulosic plant mass to extract nutrients. Australian marsupials such as the Tammar wallaby (above) contain unique, uncultured bacteria that could be useful in breaking down… [Read More]