The Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is December 10-14, 2018 in Washington, D.C. Representatives from the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) and the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBase) will be at Booth 847 in the Exhibit Hall (near the Career Center) – stop by and chat with…
A Model System for Perennial Grasses
Panicum hallii genomes offer insights to drought tolerance. The Science Researchers have developed a genomic model to study drought tolerance in perennial grasses using Panicum hallii (Hall’s panicgrass), by generating two complete genomes from varieties that diverged over a million years ago. The hallii variety thrives in desert environments, while the filipes variety is less…
JGIers on the 2018 Highly Cited Researchers List
Eleven of the JGI’s researchers are among the most highly cited in the world. That’s according to the annual list compiled by Clarivate Analytics, formerly the IP & Science arm of Thomson Reuters. (Click here to see the full list.) The 2018 list focused on Highly Cited Papers, defined in the Methodology section as “those…
JGI’s Kjiersten Fagnan Part of Winning SC18 Team
On November 15, 2018, at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18) Conference, teams led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), respectively, shared the 2018 ACM Gordon Bell Prize. Congratulations to JGI’s Chief Informatics Officer Kjiersten Fagnan, who was part of the ORNL-led,…
Hidden Giants in Forest Soils
A surprising wealth of novel giant viruses has been found in a soil ecosystem. Characterizing the diversity of microbial cells in a handful of soil is so complex it was considered impossible. To date, only a small fraction of the microbes residing in, on and around soils have been identified as part of efforts to…
Small but Sophisticated
Nanoreactor is a key enzyme in CO2-fixation cycle. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a potent greenhouse gas, and an accessible carbon source that could be converted into high-value products such as biofuels and renewable chemicals. Tobi Erb, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany and his team focus on identifying novel…
Symbiosis a Driver of Truffle Diversity
Insights from a comparative analysis of five truffle-forming fungal species. While the sight of black or white truffles being shaved over on pasta is generally considered a sign of dining extravagance, they play an important role in soil ecosystem services. Truffles are the fruiting bodies of the ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungal symbionts residing on host plant…
Probing Interactions Among Molecular Mechanisms, Cellular Processes, and Elemental Cycles
DOE user facilities EMSL and JGI announce FY 2019 collaborative FICUS projects. Two Department of Energy user facilities, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), have selected 12 of the 41 proposals received from a joint call for 2019 research under the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) initiative….
Spotlighting Differences in Closely-Related Species
Researchers build a genetic profile for a section of Aspergillus fungi. There are millions of fungal species, and those few hundred found in the Aspergillus genus play important roles in areas ranging from industrial production to agricultural plant pathogens. Reported October 22, 2018, in Nature Genetics, a team led by scientists at the Technical University…
Mining Metagenomes for Cas Proteins
Cas14 proteins discovered from JGI’s IMG/M database and biochemically characterized at UC Berkeley and the Innovative Genomics Institute. The Science Researchers report the discovery of miniature Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) associated proteins that can target single-stranded DNA (ssDNA). The discovery was made possible by mining the datasets in the Integrated Microbial Genomes…