Something special is happening with a research project focused on two white rot fungi genomes. Led by the U.S. DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, a team of international researchers is collaborating on a project to sequence and analyze the fungi strains to understand how enzymes present in the fungi break down plant biomass. It’s not the research…
On white rot, coal and biofuels in ClimateWire
The evolutionary rise of a common fungus — white rot — is responsible for the end of underground coal formation 60 million years ago, scientists say in a paper published last week in Science.Ironically, that same fungus could now be a key element to help the world move away from fossil fuels by helping to create…
A Rotten Coaltastrophe
Much of the world’s coal was generated 300-360 million years ago, during an era known as the Carboniferous period. But it may have come to an end from an unlikely source: fungus. An international team of scientists, including researchers at Clark University and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), has proposed…
Linking white rot fungi and the Carboniferous period in Scientific American
Now a new genomic analysis suggests why Earth significantly slowed its coal-making processes roughly 300 million years ago—mushrooms evolved the ability to break down lignin. “These white rot fungi are major decomposers of wood and the only organism that achieves substantial degradation of lignin,” explains mycologist David Hibbett of Clark University in Massachusetts, who led the research…
Tracking the Remnants of the Carbon Cycle: How an Ancestral Fungus May Have Influenced Coal Formation
For want of a nail, the nursery rhyme goes, a kingdom was lost. A similar, seemingly innocuous change—the evolution of a lineage of mushrooms—may have had a massive impact on the carbon cycle, bringing an end to the 60-million year period during which coal deposits were formed. Coal generated nearly half of the roughly four…
Deepwater Horizon oil spill cleanup microbes project in Examiner.com
The first research effort reported in an article published online June 21, 2012, in the ISME Journal involved samples taken immediately after the Deepwater Horizon spill began and during the ensuing clean up efforts.The researchers found that a variety of microbes consumed parts of the oil spill selectively. Each group of microbes specifically targeted one group of…
Deepwater Horizon cleanup microbes project in Oil and GasOnline
To learn more about the microbial community’s response to the oil spill, researchers led by Berkeley Lab senior scientist Janet Jansson availed themselves of the expertise and resources at two of the Lab’s national user facilities, the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and the Advanced Light Source (ALS). The work done…
Some Enzymes Like it Hot
It sounds like a dream vacation: hang out in hot springs all day, converting sugar to alcohol. But that’s precisely what researchers are looking for in microbes to more efficiently break down plant matter into fermentable sugars for biofuel. And they found it in Dictyoglomus turgidum, in samples from Obsidian Hot Spring in Yellowstone National…
Waves of Berkeley Lab Responders Deploy Omics to Track Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Cleanup Microbes
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago, various strategies were deployed to prevent 4.9 million barrels of light crude oil from fouling the waters and reaching the shores. A team of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers found that nature also played a role…
Waves of Berkeley Lab Responders Deploy Omics to Track Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Cleanup Microbes
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago, various strategies were deployed to prevent 4.9 million barrels of light crude oil from fouling the waters and reaching the shores. A team of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers found that nature also played a role…