“These bacteria and these fungi have evolved for millions of years to deconstruct plant biomass,” said Frank Aylward, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies leaf-cutter ants and their fungus gardens. “We should try to learn from them and find out how it occurs in nature.” Read more at JSOnline.com about this…
Microbial dark matter study in The Scientist
“Its scale and impact are exactly what Nature is there for,” [said Argonne National Laboratory’s Jack Gilbert.] “The data allow us to confirm some known relationships, but also uncovered some awesome new ones.” Read more in The Scientist
Microbial dark matter study in Nature
“This is an astounding paper,” says Norman Pace, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado–Boulder. “The achievement of hundreds of genome sequences from single cells at a shot is an entirely new level of microbiology.” Read more in Nature
Microbial dark matter study in BBC News
“For almost 20 years now we have been astonished by how little there is known about massive regions of the tree of life. This project is the first systematic effort to address this enormous knowledge gap.” – Phil Hugenholtz, director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University of Queensland, in Australia Read more in…
Microbial dark matter study in The Globe and Mail
“Sakinaw Lake’s hidden depths have become part of a massive effort to explore some of the least understood branches of the tree of life. “It’s a really interesting place to look for exotic microorganisms,” said Steven Hallam, an environment genomicist at the University of British Columbia.” Read more in The Globe and Mail
Microbial dark matter project in Science
“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…