The US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute is tweaking its sequencing technology lineup as it gears up to produce more than 47 trillion bases of DNA sequence in the 2012 fiscal year, with more than half that sequencing output slated to go toward its largest user program, the Community Sequencing Program. Read more on GenomeWeb
Permafrost soil metagenome study on Examiner.com
The carbon dioxide contained in the polar caps is estimated to be 1,672 billion metric tons. The slow but steady melting of the polar regions from global warming has and will continue to release more carbon as carbon dioxide as the ice sheets melt.More interesting and more potentially dangerous is the effect that melting ice…
CSP 2012 project on Science Codex
Dan Lindner, a research plant pathologist with the Northern Research Station’s Center for Forest Mycology Research (CFMR), is one of 13 scientists participating in the ‘1000 Fungal Genomes’ project, which in collaboration with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Joint Genome Institute will sequence two species from every known fungal family. The project is a first…
Permafrost soil metagenome study in Gizmodo
A team of researchers from Berkeley took chunks of permafrost soil from Alaska, and shipped them back to the lab to thaw them out in controlled conditions. As they woke up, the gassy little microorganisms trapped in the melting ice spewed out more methane than the contestants in a bean-eating competition. Read more in Gizmodo
Permafrost soil metagenome study in Alaska Dispatch
Researchers have carted chunks of Alaska permafrost off to California, where have learned that allowing the once frozen soil to thaw wakes up hungry microbes, according to newscientist.com, which also offered a cautionary tale. Read more in the Alaska Dispatch
Permafrost soil metagenome study in Discover
What’s the News: Melting permafrost in a warming world could mean lots of greenhouses gasses, especially methane, released into the atmosphere. But it also means an unusual community of soil bacteria coming out of hibernation, so to speak. A new study looks at what those permafrost microbes do, exactly, as their environment warms up. Read…
Permafrost soil metagenome study in Time
One of those wild cards is the 1,672 billion tonnes of carbon equivalent trapped in the form of methane in the Arctic permafrost, the soils kept frozen by the far North’s extreme temperatures. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas—it has 20 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide—and the total amount of carbon equivalent in…
Permafrost soil metagenome study on LiveScience
“Nobody has looked at what happens to microbes when the permafrost thaws,” said Janet Jansson, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. She led a study that recorded what happened when chunks of Alaskan permafrost thawed for the first time in 1,200 years. Read more on LiveScience
Permafrost soil metagenome study in UK Press Association
At the testing laboratories, US researchers extracted almost 40 billion elements of raw DNA, reflecting high microbial diversity in the soil.The scientists were also able to piece together the genetic code, or genome, of a previously unknown methane-producing “methanogen” that was present in large numbers. Reporting their findings in an early online edition of the journal…
Permafrost soil metagenome study in GenomeWeb
“Currently in climate models, it’s not really taken into account adequately what the microorganisms are doing,” senior author Janet Jansson, a researcher affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, told GenomeWeb Daily News. “The hope is to get enough information at the microscopic level that we’ll have…