The Microbial Program exploits expertise and emerging technologies in sequencing, annotation and analysis, to deliver high quality and high throughput sequence-based science in response to the needs of the DOE JGI users and the scientific community. Scientific focus areas include terrestrial carbon cycling and plant-microbe interactions.
Among major initiatives of the Microbial Program are:
- Diversification of the microbial product catalog. Beyond minimal draft and improved draft microbial genomes the program offers single-cell sequencing, resequencing, RNA sequencing and epigenomics.
- Expansion of sequence space. To expand the coverage of phylogenomic sequence space, we generate reference genome datasets from highly diverse branches of the bacterial and archaeal tree of life. The value of such effort includes the generation of phylogenetic anchors for metagenomic datasets, the improvement of annotation, an increased insight into phylogenetic distribution of functions, the discovery of novel genes, protein families, pathways and a better understanding on evolutionary diversification.
- Exploration of ‘function-driven’ single-cell genomics. In an effort to target specific uncultivated community members of interest from complex ecosystems, we are exploring methodologies that enable the capture and sequencing of single cells, as based on a desired phenotypic or functional trait. For a one-minute video definition of single-cell genomics, go here.
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Computational systems and methods
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More about this program