In Natural Prodcast, guest Brian Bachmann covers genome mining from cave environments, and using biosynthetic engineering and synthetic biology to modify and analog complex natural product molecules.
Natural Prodcast co-hosts Dan Udwary and Jackie Winter chat with Brian Bachmann on genome mining from cave environments, and using biosynthetic engineering and synthetic biology to modify and analog complex natural product molecules
In Nature Communications, a method to correctly identify polyploid subgenomes without needing to know the genomes of their ancestors.
Meet researchers who have hiked, rafted and met local wildlife (a marmot!) as they’ve sampled the microbial communities living in the mountaintop lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. These lakes are isolated, but varied. They’re a great way to see how climate change affects freshwater ecosystems, and how those ecosystems work.
Right now, our natural rubber comes from just one tree species: Hevea brasiliensis. It’s great at producing latex that becomes rubber, but it’s vulnerable to disease and climate shifts. So researchers are looking into a desert shrub that’s native to North America: guayule.
The ocean depths are vast and dark. But there are hotspots on the ocean floor — underwater volcanoes and hydrothermal vents — where lively microbial communities thrive, and even support entire ecosystems. Hear from researchers Anna-Louise Reysenbach, Emily St. John, Gilberto Flores, and Peter Girguis about sampling these communities, and understanding how they’ve adapted to this extreme environment.
In our warming world, we’ll need corn, sorghum and other crops to grow well in worse conditions: with more heat, less water and less fertilizer. Grasses do better in these conditions, so plant biologists James Schnable, Guangchao Sun and Vladimir Torrres have looked into traits that could transfer from grasses into other crops. One grass they studied just happened to be the same species that covered World Cup pitches in 2022.
Building on existing virus-host prediction approaches, researchers have created a new program called iPHoP. It combines and evaluates multiple predictions to reliably match viruses with their archaea and bacteria hosts.
Applying this method to the study of a particular fungi, researchers identified novel interactions between bacteria and the fungi.
The US Department of Energy’s Office of Science is seeking input on the need and the structure of a unified data framework that links or integrates existing data activities within the Biological and Environmental Research Program (BER). The aim is to gather current and future science questions that require a more integrated data infrastructure for…
Microbial communities around hydrothermal vents survive in very hot, high-pressure and chemically-rich ecosystems. They hold clues for understanding how life thrives in extreme environments.
