To overcome the challenge of breaking down cellulosic biomass for commercial biofuel production, which involves the application of high temperatures, a team of researchers including DOE JGI’s Martin Allgaier, now at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Germany, and Phil Hugenholtz, now director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University…
Dry rot (Serpula) genome project in BasqueResearch.com
Science journal has published research work on the sequence of the genome of the Serpula lacrymans fungus and in which the Public University of Navarre (UPNA) lecturers Gerardo Pisabarro de Lucas and José Antonio Oguiza Tomé, professor and senior lecturer in Microbiology respectively, participated. The research, largely funded by the US Department of Energy through…
Dark ocean project in Climate Action
To understand the world’s climate, we must understand how the 70% of the Earths surface that is covered with water behaves. Very little is known about the processes below 200m, or the area where photosynthesis is not possible due to the lack of light penetration. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute…
Capturing carbon in the dark ocean
Using single cell genomics, researchers identified bacteria in the “twilight zone” that are involved in capturing carbon.
Up from the Depths: How Bacteria Capture Carbon in the “Twilight Zone”
WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—Understanding the flow and processing of carbon in the world’s oceans, which cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface, is central to understanding global climate cycles, with many questions remaining unanswered. Between 200 and 1,000 meters below the ocean surface exists a “twilight zone” where insufficient sunlight penetrates for microorganisms to perform photosynthesis. Despite…
A mechanism for de novo intron insertion
Introns are the parts of a gene sequence that are not expressed in the protein. In the August 30 issue of Nature Communications, a team led by DOE JGI’s Eukaryote Program head Dan Rokhsar and Uffe Hellsten describe a potential mechanism by which introns have been added to a genome sequence since what they refer…
A “meraculous” way to conduct whole-genome assemblies
The dramatic shift in sequencing technologies that allows genome researchers to generate the equivalent of a single human genome in days rather than the decades it took multiple organizations to complete a single one has also shifted the bottleneck from sequence production to sequence assembly. For example, the Sanger platform routinely produced reads 700 basepairs…
DOE JGI’s Prochnik in Discovery News
“This one-celled organism hunts and eats bacteria as an amoeba, swims around looking for a better environment as a flagellate, and then hunkers down and waits for good times as a cyst,” said Simon Prochnik, a computational scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. “It is a very rare process to go…
Xylose-fermenting yeast project in Ethanol Producer
Using Mother Nature as their teacher, researchers at the U.S. DOE’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, along with the DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, have sequenced the genomes of two types of yeasts found in bark beetles and then compared and contrasted the results with other yeasts’ genome sequences to determine which can best convert the…
Toward a Better Understanding of Soil-Microbe Interactions
In the August 2011 issue of the Journal of Bacteriology, a team of researchers led by DOE JGI’s Patrick Chain at Los Alamos National Laboratory focused on a microbe that can help or harm as the case may be. Ochrobactrum anthropi thrives in a variety of habitats including polluted soil, plants and even higher mammals….