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Content Tagged "biofuel"

Of Soil Carbon and Climate Change

Thanks to genome sequencing techniques such as those at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, we now have a much better idea of what microbes are in soil, what they’re doing, and what proteins they’re producing. That’s important, because a handful of soil can teem with millions of microbes, some… [Read More]

Thermophilic fungi in Scientific American

Heat-loving fungi could provide a key enzyme for making low cost biofuel, and a team of “mushroom detectives” from the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute think they’ve just nailed their man – er, fungus. Read more at Scientific American  [Read More]

Thermophilic fungi in energyNOW!

Next-generation biofuel refining is based on tweaking enzymes to break down plant walls and convert biomass to fermentable sugars. The research has two main goals. One is to find ways to cut down the energy input needed for biofuel processing.  Read more on energyNOW! [Read More]

Thermophilic fungi in Walnut Creek Patch

Research on fungi at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek is heating up the nation’s efforts to develop biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. Read more on the Walnut Creek Patch  [Read More]

Structural Analysis of Cow and Hoatzin Microbial Communities

Inside the guts of many animals, microbes break down the plant fibers ingested as part of their diet. These microbes are of interest to bioenergy researchers who want to learn from nature and apply these cellulosic degradation capabilities toward biofuel production. To this end, at the JGI, several sequencing projects have focused on the microbial… [Read More]

Genomic analysis of self-fertilizing fungi

Filamentous fungi help decay plant material, a process which has applications for producing biofuels and other products. The model organism for filamentous fungi is Neurospora tetrasperma. Neurospora tetrasperma rosette (Image by Namboori B. Raju, Stanford University) Selected for the DOE JGI’s 2007 Community Sequencing Program, the fungi is of interest to researchers such as studying… [Read More]

Soil biocrust microbial genome

One of the DOE JGI’s 2011 Community Sequencing Program projects involves studying biological soil crusts to understand their role in the global carbon cycle. Found in arid lands which make up nearly half of the planet’s total land mass, communities of lichens, mosses and cyanobacteria use soil particles to form biocrusts less than half an… [Read More]

High-temperature enzymes for biomass breakdown

To overcome the challenge of breaking down cellulosic biomass for commercial biofuel production, which involves the application of high temperatures, a team of researchers including DOE JGI’s Martin Allgaier, now at the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Germany, and Phil Hugenholtz, now director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University… [Read More]

Dry rot (Serpula) genome project in BasqueResearch.com

Science journal has published research work on the sequence of the genome of the Serpula lacrymans fungus and in which the Public University of Navarre (UPNA) lecturers Gerardo Pisabarro de Lucas and José Antonio Oguiza Tomé, professor and senior lecturer in Microbiology respectively, participated. The research, largely funded by the US Department of Energy through… [Read More]

A “meraculous” way to conduct whole-genome assemblies

The dramatic shift in sequencing technologies that allows genome researchers to generate the equivalent of a single human genome in days rather than the decades it took multiple organizations to complete a single one has also shifted the bottleneck from sequence production to sequence assembly. For example, the Sanger platform routinely produced reads 700 basepairs… [Read More]