“Three years ago, Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and colleagues decided to head into this uncharted territory by applying a newly developed sequencing approach to bacteria and archaea. Until recently, determining a genome’s makeup required many copies of the DNA, and thus only microbes grown in the…
Boldly Illuminating Biology’s “Dark Matter”
Is space really the final frontier, or are the greatest mysteries closer to home? In cosmology, dark matter is said to account for the majority of mass in the universe, however its presence is inferred by indirect effects rather than detected through telescopes. The biological equivalent is “microbial dark matter,” that pervasive yet practically invisible…
Noncoding DNA Map Provides Insight to Plant Gene Regulation
Widely used as a model for plant research, Arabidopsis thaliana was the first plant to have its genome completely sequenced. However, there is still much to learn about this plant, including the function of its many DNA conserved noncoding sequences (CNSs). These regions hold key roles in activating certain traits during plant development, but why…
Genome Streamlining a Survival Strategy in Marine Microbes
The ocean’s surface or photic zone, where sufficient light enables photosynthesis, harbors vast amounts of life-sustaining microbes that attach themselves to plankton. A large portion of the carbon in the ocean is processed by these microbes, which helps sustain the abundance of diverse marine life. But these microbes can be exceedingly difficult to culture in…
Streamlining a Common Survival Strategy in Marine Microbes
Despite advances made in the fields of DNA sequencing and analysis, researchers have barely begun to scratch the tip of the iceberg in cataloging the planet’s microbial diversity, mainly because only a minute fraction of the millions of species of microbes have been cultured in the laboratory. In marine as well as terrestrial environments, the…
Ehux – The Alga of Many Faces
Known by the researchers who sequenced it at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute as “The Beast”, and considered the “Flowers of the Ocean” by others, Emiliania huxleyi has proved to be a single-celled coccolithophore of many faces. The third most abundant group of phytoplankton, Ehux is the basis of most ocean food chains,…
Ehux pangenome project in San Diego Union-Tribune
The algae are the third most abundant phytoplankton, and are a key component of the ocean food chain, nourishing animals including crustaceans, shellfish and other filter feeders.They’re characterized by their intricate shells, composed of interwoven lattices of calcium carbonate.“We kind of think of them as flowers of the ocean,” Read said. Read the full story…
Capsella provides insight into the genomic results of selfing
About 200,000 years ago, Capsella rubella began self fertilizing and split from C. grandiflora. To study the effects of selfing on C. rubella’s genome, the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute sequenced and compared it with C. grandiflora and members of the closely related Arabidopsis genus – the first plant ever sequenced and model species…
Ehux pangenome project in redOrbit
“The Ehux genome is incredibly variable,” said study co-author Dr. Uwe John and biologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). “For example, if the genetic information of two humans is compared, an agreement of about 99 per cent is found. However, if, for example, we take two Ehux strains from…
Chalking up a Marine Blooming Alga: Genome Fills a Gap in the Tree of Life
To World War II soldiers, “The White Cliffs of Dover” was a morale-boosting song that lifted spirits in dark times. To geographers, the white cliffs mark the point at which England is closest to continental Europe. To scientists, the white cliffs are towering structures made of the chalky, white shells that envelop the single-celled photosynthetic…