Scientists have now sequenced the genome of a weird, single-celled organism called Naegleria gruberi that is telling biologists about that transition from prokaryotes, which function just fine with all their proteins floating around in a soup, to eukaryotes, which neatly compartmentalize those proteins? The sequence, produced by the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI),…
Naegleria genome project on KPCC Pasadena
“Naegleria‘s pretty amazing because it can make one of these structures entirely from scratch. And it does it really fast,” Fritz-Laylin says. “It can do it in an hour to an hour and a half.” She wanted to understand how that happens. And sure enough, there are clues in the organism’s genes. She and her…
Naegleria genome project on Boston’s WBUR
These days, when you want to see what makes an organism tick, you order up a scan of its genes. And as it happens, scientists at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., were sequencing a bunch of organisms, and they had a little extra room in their DNA-reading machines. So…
Naegleria genome project on Bay Area PBS (KQED)
Step aside, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Here’s a story about an organism that dramatically transforms itself when it’s under stress. It turns from a lethargic amoeba into a sprightly, two-armed swimmer. This unlikely single-celled creature is named Naegleria gruberi. It lives in the dirt, under the eucalyptus trees, on the University of California, Berkeley…
Naegleria genome project on Bay Area’s ABC7 news
At UC Berkeley, there is new hope for some of mankind’s biggest maladies from research about the smallest of creatures. “What we have found is fundamental,” Simon Prochnik, a bioinformaticist at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, said. Prochnik studies the genetic make-up of single celled amoebas. He and a team of researchers have now sequenced…
BNET on PacBio’s first customers
Last week, Pacific BioSciences, which claims it will map a genome in 15 minutes for less than $1000 by 2013, announced several new partnerships which they say will help customers “rapidly and easily adopt” their sequencing technology. That’s big news, because Pacific BioSciences’s customers are ten research institutions, including major players in genetics like The Broad Institute…
Naegleria genome project on NPR
Step aside, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Here’s a story about an organism that dramatically transforms itself when it’s under stress. It turns from a lethargic amoeba into a sprightly, two-armed swimmer. This unlikely single-celled creature is named Naegleria gruberi. It lives in the dirt, under the eucalyptus trees, on the University of California, Berkeley…
Naegleria genome project on PhysOrg.com
Scientists have now sequenced the genome of a weird, single-celled organism called Naegleria gruberi that is telling biologists about that transition from prokaryotes, which function just fine with all their proteins floating around in a soup, to eukaryotes, which neatly compartmentalize those proteins? The sequence, produced by the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI),…
Naegleria genome project on ScienceDaily
Naegleria is a common soil amoeba — the sequenced organism was isolated from the mud in a grove of eucalyptus trees on the UC Berkeley campus — that, under stress, quickly grows two flagella, like sperm tails, that it uses to swim around. It has a third identity, a hard cyst, that can persist in…
Naegleria genome project on redOrbit
“In a sense, analyzing the Naegleria genome shows us what it would be like to be on this planet more than a billion years ago, and what kind of organisms were around then and what they might have looked like,” said Simon E. Prochnik, a JGI and UC Berkeley bioinformaticist and coauthor of the Cell…