Personally, my favorite talk at the last 6th Annual DOE JGI Users Meeting at Walnut Creek was Rob Knight‘s contribution on ‘Spatially and Temporally Resolved Studies of the Human Microbiome‘. Rob was creative and integrative. Displaying the biogeography of bacterial communities on the human body using UniFrac and QUIME was astounding. Read more at the…
Eisen blogs Twitter wrap-up of the DOE JGI User Meeting
Off to another meeting so don’t have time to write up details of the JGI User Meeting that just ended. But I am posting my tweets and some related tweets here. Also, apparently videos of the talks will be available soon. Will try to clean up the style of the posts ASAP but on the…
Finding cellulases in sediment from a paper mill
During the DOE JGI User Meeting held in Walnut Creek, Calif. from March 22-24, 2011, collaborator Daniel Distel noted that more than 20 enzymes are needed to break down cellulose. To assist in identifying novel cellulose degraders and thus improve cellulosic biofuel production processes, a team of DOE JGI researchers including Microbial Program head TanjaWoyke…
Tasmanian devils at DOE JGI User Meeting in GenomeWeb
As part of the large-scale conservation effort he calls “Project Ark,” Schuster and his team intend to genotype hundreds of Tasmanian devils, he told attendees of the sixth annual Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute User Meeting held in Walnut Creek, Calif., this week. To date, he said, devil tumor facial disease does not seem…
Alfred University selected for DOE JGI Undergraduate Research Program in Microbial Genome Annotation
Alfred University is one of only 21 institutions in the country to be selected for the federal Joint Genome Institution (JGI) Undergraduate Research Program in Microbial Genome Collaboration. What that means, explains Jean Cardinale, professor of biology in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, is Alfred University students will have a unique opportunity to…
DOE JGI as ‘Genomics Foundry’ in GenomeWeb
The Joint Genome Institute plans to transition from a sequencing center to a “genomic foundry” — a one-stop shop for large-scale functional annotation, single-cell genomics and transcriptomics, high-throughput custom sample prep, and analysis expertise, among other proposed services, said Eddy Rubin at JGI’s sixth annual User Meeting in Walnut Creek, Calif. Ultimately, Rubin said, he…
Earth Microbiome Project in Sacramento Bee
To understand microbes (Bacterial, Archaeal, Eukaryal and Viral) in terms of whom they are and what they do is the challenge of microbial ecology. The EMP presents a revolution in how this problem is tackled and defines both questions and potential suite of tools to provide answers. Key participants in this unprecedented project include BGI,…
Earth Microbiome Project in GenomeWeb
BGI will provide a range of services and support for the Earth Microbiome Project, an effort to sample, sequence, and analyze microbial communities from all over the globe. The multi-disciplinary EMP effort, the largest sequencing project yet undertaken, will conduct metagenomics studies of 200,000 samples of microbes from soil, air, sea, and freshwater systems from…
Aureococcus genome project in Knoxville News Sentinel
The research team’s study focused on one particular strand of harmful algal blooms: Aureococcus anophagefferens. Originally, the team thought this strand would be found in the deep oceans, but the researchers discovered instead that it actually thrived in the human-affected conditions of the coastal regions. Read more at knoxnews.com
Toward a Genomic Encyclopedia of Fungi
Fungi are key components of terrestrial ecosystems and help maintain the interactions between a myriad of species of animals, plants and bacteria that make up these environments. With the ability to thrive in a wide variety of ecological niches, fungi are essential to the global carbon cycle, and the enzymes and metabolites they produce are…