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…
Mapping Heat Resistance in Yeasts
A new approach for improving functional annotation in fungal genomes. The Science In a proof-of-concept study, researchers demonstrated that a new genetic mapping strategy called RH-Seq can identify genes that promote heat resistance in the brewer’s/baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, allowing this species to grow better than its closest relative S. paradoxus at high temperatures (39°C/102°F)….
Expanding Fungal Diversity, One Cell at a Time
Pilot study demonstrates single cell genomics approach for fungal genomic diversity. They can be found on forest floors, swamps and in houses, ranging in size from smaller than the period on your smartphone’s keyboard to stretching over several city blocks. More than a million species of fungi are estimated to live on this planet, but…
Adaptive Strategies of Bradyrhizobium
Soil microbial communities are among the richest sources of biodiversity on Earth. However, very little is known about the roles of individual microbial populations living in soil and how they affect important processes such as soil fertility and carbon cycling. This proposal investigates free-living Bradyrhizobium, an abundant and widespread soil bacterium, and will provide mechanistic…