The annual JGI Holiday Food Drive of 2014 brought nearly a ton of food to the the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano. Over half of the total came from the family of software developer Bobby Otillar, who pledged to match the amount of food donated by fellow JGIers pound-for-pound for the third year in a row. This…
How a White Rot Tackles Freshly-Cut Wood
Unlike many other white rot fungi, P. gigantea prefers to colonize freshly-harvested wood. The Science: Researchers sequenced and analyzed the white rot fungus Phlebiopsis gigantea, which can break down fresh-cut conifer sapwood. They also sequenced and analyzed the set of P. gigantea’s secreted proteins (secretome) and the set of all of its RNA molecules (transcriptome)….
Eucalyptus grandis Genome 2.0—Community Resource
Genetic maps improve the reference genome assembly of the candidate bioenergy feedstock The Science: A team of French researchers developed an array that allowed them to produce high-resolution genetic maps of two eucalyptus species that they then compared to the reference genome of eucalyptus produced by a team including DOE JGI researchers. The Impact: The…
NCBI Genomes Reprocessed using IMG’s Annotation Pipelines and Distributed via JGI’s Genome Portals
The Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) system provides tools for analyzing the structural and functional annotations of metagenomes and single genomes in a comparative context. At the core of the IMG system is a data warehouse that contains genome and metagenome datasets (sets of genome sequence fragments from microbial communities) sequenced at the DOE Joint Genome…
Noteworthy DOE JGI papers in Nature Methods
Three publications are featured in the Special 10th Anniversary issue. The Science: To mark its 10th anniversary, the journal Nature Methods released a Special Issue highlighting impactful articles. Among these noteworthy articles are three from DOE JGI researchers. The Impact: Microbial Sequencing is one of the areas of methods development highlighted by the journal, and…
Shipworm project in the Washington Post
“Shipworms were already weird animals, but they just got weirder. The ocean-dwelling clams, which actually look much more like slimy worms, are some of the only creatures in the world that can eat wood. Now scientists have figured out that shipworms are even more unique than we thought…” The Washington Post article was published November 11, 2014. Learn…
Termite of the Sea’s Wood Destruction Strategy Revealed
Directed production of wood-degrading enzymes begins away from the gut The sight of termites anywhere near one’s house is enough to raise a homeowner’s concerns about the potential damage these insects might inflict. Shipbuilders and engineers have similar feelings about shipworms, worm-like wood-eating marine clams that have also been called the “termites of the sea.”…
Discovering the Undiscovered
Advancing New Tools to Fill in the Microbial Tree of Life To paraphrase a famous passage from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: microbes, microbes everywhere, though most we do not know. This is changing, though. In a perspective piece published November 6 in the journal Science, Eddy Rubin, Director of the U.S. Department…
Mapping water management traits related to panic grass variants
Water availability is often a factor in how variants of plant species evolve. The Science: Researchers statistically mapped regions of the panic grass genome linked to morphological traits such as thriving under scarce (xeric) or moderate (mesic) water availability. The information lends insights into how ecotypes are formed as evolving populations of a species adapt…
Celebrating National Bioenergy Day
In honor of National Bioenergy Day, we thought we’d highlight some of our recent projects that are related to developing plant biomass, as well as agricultural waste and forestry byproducts, to generate heat and energy. Among the plants being considered for biomass crops are eucalyptus trees, which grow in 100 countries and cover over 40…