The researchers, who will speak Monday evening at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, are working with the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, a federal facility for genetic sequencing of microbes and other life-forms. The terrestrial ecosystem, meaning everything on land — from plants to soil and other geological features —…
Selaginella genome project in Biofuels Journal
Published online May 5 in Science Express, a team of researchers from over 60 institutions, that included DOE JGI’s Dan Rokhsar and Igor Grigoriev, the senior authors of this work, reported the genome sequence of Selaginella moellendorffii and used a comparative genomics approach to identify the core genes that are likely to be present in a common ancestor…
Selaginella genome project on redOrbit
Grigoriev noted that the Selaginella genome helps fill in a large gap in plant evolution from the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas, sequenced at the DOE JGI and published in 2007, to flowering plants with vascular systems. “Selaginella occupies a phylogenetically important position for which we had no reference,” he said. “On one end of the…
Poplar leaf rust fungal genome project on Hoosier Farmers
Poplar leaf rust can cause significant losses in poplar tree plantations. Poplar is an important crop for the wood industry and is becoming increasingly important to the biofuel industry in the United States and Europe because of its rapid and significant production of biomass. Read more on Hoosier Farmers
Selaginella genome project in Western Farm Press
“There are only three families and about 1,000 species of lycophytes remaining. Selaginella has been on Earth about 200 million years,” said Banks, whose findings were published Thursday (May 5) in the journal Science. “This plant is a survivor. It has a really long history and it hasn’t really changed much over time. When you…
JGI Science @ the Lesher in Financial Tech Spotlight
The one-celled creatures are now part of a major research initiative at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to explore ways to recapture more of the 6 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide human activities generate annually The researchers, who will speak Monday evening at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, are working with the…
JGI Science @ the Lesher in Contra Costa Times
The researchers, who will speak Monday evening at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, are working with the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, a federal facility for genetic sequencing of microbes and other life-forms. The terrestrial ecosystem, meaning everything on land — from plants to soil and other geological features —…
Selaginella genome project on ScienceBlog
“When you burn coal, you’re burning Selaginella‘s ancestors,” said Purdue University botanist Jody Banks, who originally proposed that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) sequence the plant more commonly known as spikemoss as part of the DOE JGI’s 2005 Community Sequencing Program. Read more on ScienceBlog
Selaginella genome project in CORDIS Wire
This genome, sequenced by the Joint Genome Institute of the U.S. Department of Energy, is expected to give scientists a better understanding of how plants of all kinds evolved over the past 500 million years. Banks, a professor of botany and plant pathology, led a team of about 100 scientists from 11 countries to sequence…
Poplar rust fungus in comparative genomics study
Rust plant pathogens make up a large fungal group which cannot survive on their own so they use crops as hosts, leading to reduced yields and potentially hindering efforts to grow biomass for fuel. To learn more about these, a 2006 Community Sequencing Program project generated the 101-million base pair genome of the poplar leaf…