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…
Naegleria genome project on EurekAlert
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),…
MIT Technology Review: JGI to test PacBio’s new sequencer
The company unveiled the instrument to attendees of the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, a swanky event that has become the place to make a splash in sequencing. With venture funding of $266 million to date and a unique technology capable of reading single DNA molecules in real-time, Pacific Biosciences has been the…
Soybean project in GenomeWeb literature reference
A large team comprised of researchers from Purdue University, the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, and the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service used whole-genome shotgun sequencing to sequence roughly 85 percent of the 1.1-gigabase soybean, Glycine max, genome. The paper describes how the team integrated the shotgun approach with physical and…
JGI researchers on Caliper’s Scientific Advisory Board
Caliper Life Sciences Inc., a Hopkinton-based provider of tools and services for drug discovery and life sciences research, recently formed a scientific advisory board to guide its efforts in automated sample preparation for next-generation and third-generation sequencing platforms. Read more at Metro West Daily News.
JGI to get PacBio machine on Forbes
PacBio’s DNA-sequencing technology generated a huge amount of excitement when it was described in a cover article in Science because it could someday make it possible to sequence an entire genome in minutes for less than $1,000. The first machines now being rolled out are only a step on the way to this goal, and…
JGI named a PacBio customer on GenomeWeb
The first 10 early-access customers are Baylor College of Medicine, the Broad Institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, the Genome Center at Washington University, Monsanto, the National Cancer Institute/SAIC-Frederick, the National Center for Genome Resources, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, and Stanford University. Read more at GenomeWeb.
Brachypodium genome project collaborator Oregon State’s release
“What this work provides is a highly informative roadmap to explore and improve plants of great agricultural value, like wheat,” said James Carrington, director of the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing, and a co-author of the study. “The quality of science that can be done with plants like Brachypodium is really exceptional.” Read more…
Brachypodium project in Biofuels Digest
In Washington, researchers at the USDA and the Joint Genome Institute today announced that they have completed sequencing the genome of Brachypodium distachyon, similar to switchgrass – as a model organism that is similar to but easier to grow and study than important agricultural crops, used by plant scientists the way other researchers use lab…