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Content Tagged "Phil Hugenholtz"

Termite diets dictate microbes in their guts

Realtors and homeowners cringe at the thought of termites on their properties, but for bioenergy researchers, these insects are rich harbors of microbial communities that can break down woody lignocellulose. In 2007, the DOE Joint Genome Institute sequenced the microbes in the hindgut of termites from Costa Rica (from the Nasutitermesgenus) to identify the genes… [Read More]

Arabidopsis root microbiome project: release from University of Queensland

Led by the University of North Carolina and the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, the research studied the microbiome in soil around the roots of more than 600 Arabidopsis thaliana plants. The team, which included The University of Queensland Professor Philip Hugenholtz, investigated how the microbiome helps shuttle nutrients and information into and out… [Read More]

Revisiting the importance of studying the microbes in termite guts

According to Leadbetter, the termite holds the key to unlocking all of this potential. But understanding how to do it won’t be easy.People have enlisted the help of microbes before, but never with this degree of complexity. “For 6,000 years,” he said, “we’ve been making beer, wine and bread using yeast,” which is a single-cell… [Read More]

Dietary impacts on hoatzin crop microbial communities

Many DOE JGI metagenomic projects focus on microbial communities in the guts of the cow, termite and even the desert locust, all known to break down plant biomass for energy. In studying these and other gut microbial communities, researchers hope to identify and isolate genes involved in plant biomass degradation, and apply them to biofuel… [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]

Phil Hugenholtz on metagenomics and ecogenomics in Australian Life Scientist

In research published in Nature in 2007, Hugenholtz, along with collaborators from the California Institute of Technology and Diversa (now Verenium) Corporation, used metagenomics to detail the process by which a dry wood feeding termite, a Nasutitermes species, breaks down cellulose.  They generated 62 million base pairs – a “drop in the ocean by today’s… [Read More]

Unpredictable MDA biases in metagenomic analyses

Genomic studies of low-biomass environments is often limited by the amount of DNA available, and one solution has been to use a whole genome amplification technique that uses phi29 DNA polymerase known as multiple displacement amplification (MDA). When used in single cell genomic studies, one noted drawback of the procedure has been amplification bias that… [Read More]

“Bioprospecting Termites” at Spectre Footnotes

In 2005, the microbial ecologist Falk Warnecke, of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, traveled with researchers from Caltech and the San Diego biotech company Diversa to Costa Rica, where they opened up a termite nest in a tree. The group dissected 165 worker termites, freezing the contents of their third guts in liquid… [Read More]

DOE JGI’s Phil Hugenholtz at “Microbes at UQ” Symposium

Keynote speaker Dr Phil Hugenholtz will be describing recent advances in the metagenomic analysis of the microbial communities within the termite hind-gut, following on from work published in Nature in 2007. The stomachs of termites actually harbor a gold mine of microbes that have now been tapped as a rich source of enzymes for improving… [Read More]