A first draft of the cacao genome is complete, a consortium of academic, governmental, and industry scientists announced today. Indiana University Bloomington scientists performed much of the sequencing work, which is described and detailed at http://www.cacaogenomedb.org/, the official website of the Cacao Genome Database project. Despite being led and funded by a private company, Mars…
HudsonAlpha involved in cacao genome project
Excerpted from EurekAlert!: “Mockaitis, a biochemist-turned-genomicist, joined the project in early 2009, and quickly set to work with her collaborators to tackle the challenge of sequencing and accurately pasting together the approximately 400 million base pairs of the tree’s genome. Mockaitis’ Cacao Genome Group partners at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Subtropical Horticulture Research Station…
New clues for understanding a novel cellulolytic process
Fibrobacter succinogenes is an anaerobic bacterium that breaks down plant cell wall biomass in ruminants and converts the cellulose into glucose. Sequenced at the DOE JGI for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), the 3.8 million base genome was completed and the information submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information in late 2009….
Bacterial lessons in rare metal recovery
One of the goals of the DOE’s Genomics:GTL Program is understanding how microbes and microbial communities perform the functions that have helped them thrive in a wide variety of environments and which have applications in the DOE mission areas of bioenergy, carbon cycling and biogeochemistry. British scientists applied information gleaned from Desulfovibrio genomes sequenced by…
Brachypodium genome project on The Warsaw Voice
Brachypodium distachyon, commonly called purple false brome, is a model grass that enables researchers to more easily and thoroughly study temperate cereals, such as wheat, barley, rye and oats. These grasses are one of the most important groups of domesticated plants. The sequencing of the nuclear genome of Brachypodium is a big step towards intensified…
Sponge genome project on Cosmos magazine
It’s just a blob, with no eyes, no nervous system, no muscle, no gut, no circulatory system, no tissues of any sort really – just cells embedded in a jelly matrix. They’re not even considered true animals. Yet according to the Nature report the sponge genome, which was read by researchers at the University of…
Standardizing metagenomic classifications
A five-tier metagenome classification system would enable genomic researchers to better extract and understand data. (Image from Ivanova et al. Env Microbiol. 2010: 12(7):1803-1805.) Studying the genomes of microbial communities, or metagenomics, has been facilitated in the last few years by advances in sequencing technologies. However, as the DOE JGI’s Natalia Ivanova, Susannah Tringe, Dino…
A bacterium for biohydrogen production
Breaking down organic wastes typically involves microbial communities of bacteria and archaea working in concert with methanogens, which remove the hydrogen generated during the degradation process. The interactions between these syntrophic communities are being studied to understand the roles these microbes play individually and and as whole. In the August 2010 issue of the journal…
Sponge genome project on Inside Science
According to the new study, which was based on a species of sponge found on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the creature has some 18,000 genes. This is fewer than the number of genes humans possess (currently estimated at about 20,500 genes) — but not far off. A few years ago,…
Updating Genomics and Bioinformatics Courses for Undergraduates
Responding to the National Research Council of the National Academies’ call to “involve students in working with real data and tolls that reflect the nature of life sciences research in the 21st century,” the DOE JGI’s Education Program, headed by Cheryl Kerfeld, collaborated with faculty members from several universities around the country to develop bioinformatics…