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    Tracing the Evolution of Shiitake Mushrooms
    Understanding Lentinula genomes and their evolution could provide strategies for converting plant waste into sugars for biofuel production. Additionally, these fungi play a role in the global carbon cycle.

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    Soil Virus Offers Insight into Maintaining Microorganisms
    Through a collaborative effort, researchers have identified a protein in soil viruses that may promote soil health.

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    Data yielded from RIViT-seq increased the number of sigma factor-gene pairs confirmed in Streptomyces coelicolor from 209 to 399. Here, grey arrows denote previously known regulation and red arrows are regulation identified by RIViT-seq; orange nodes mark sigma factors while gray nodes mark other genes. (Otani, H., Mouncey, N.J. Nat Commun 13, 3502 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31191-w)
    Streamlining Regulon Identification in Bacteria
    Regulons are a group of genes that can be turned on or off by the same regulatory protein. RIViT-seq technology could speed up associating transcription factors with their target genes.

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    Mapping Switchgrass Traits with Common Gardens
    The combination of field data and genetic information has allowed researchers to associate climate adaptations with switchgrass biology.

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    Artist rendering of genome standards being applied to deciphering the extensive diversity of viruses. (Illustration by Leah Pantea)
    Expanding Metagenomics to Capture Viral Diversity
    Along with highlighting the viruses in a given sample, metagenomics shed light on another key aspect of viruses in the environment — their sheer genetic diversity.

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    Photograph of a stream of diatoms beneath Arctic sea ice.
    Polar Phytoplankton Need Zinc to Cope with the Cold
    As part of a long-term collaboration with the JGI Algal Program, researchers studying function and activity of phytoplankton genes in polar waters have found that these algae rely on dissolved zinc to photosynthesize.

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    Silver Age of GOLD Introduces New Features
    The Genomes OnLine Database makes curated microbiome metadata that follows community standards freely available and enables large-scale comparative genomics analysis initiatives.

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    Graphical overview of the RNA Virus MetaTranscriptomes Project. (Courtesy of Simon Roux)
    A Better Way to Find RNA Virus Needles in the Proverbial Database Haystacks
    Researchers combed through more than 5,000 data sets of RNA sequences generated from diverse environmental samples around the world, resulting in a five-fold increase of RNA virus diversity.

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    HPCwire Editor's Choice Award (logo crop) for Best Use of HPC in the Life Sciences
    JGI Part of Berkeley Lab Team Awarded Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences
    The HPCwire Editors Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences went to the Berkeley Lab team comprised of JGI and ExaBiome Project team, supported by the DOE Exascale Computing Project for MetaHipMer, an end-to-end genome assembler that supports “an unprecedented assembly of environmental microbiomes.”

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    Digital ID card with six headshots reads: Congratulations to our 2022 Function Genomics recipients!
    Final Round of 2022 CSP Functional Genomics Awardees
    Meet the final six researchers whose proposals were selected for the 2022 Community Science Program Functional Genomics call.

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    CSP New Investigators FY23 R1
    JGI Announces First Round of 2023 New Investigator Awardees
    Twice each year we look for novel research projects aligned with DOE missions and from PIs who have not led any previously-accepted proposals through the CSP New Investigator call.

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    screencap from Amundson and Wilkins subsurface microbiome video
    Digging into Microbial Ecosystems Deep Underground
    JGI users and microbiome researchers at Colorado State University have many questions about the microbial communities deep underground, including the role viral infection may play in other natural ecosystems.

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    2022 JGI-UC Merced interns (Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab)
    Exploring Possibilities: 2022 JGI-UC Merced Interns
    The 2022 UC Merced intern cohort share how their summer internship experiences have influenced their careers in science.

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    Using Team Science to Build Communities Around Data
    As the data portals grow and evolve, the research communities further expand around them. But with two projects, communities are forming to generate high quality genomes to benefit researchers.

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    Cow Rumen and the Early Days of Metagenomics
    Tracing a cow rumen dataset from the lab to material for a hands-on undergraduate research course at CSU-San Marcos that has since expanded into three other universities.

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Home › Items tagged with: Phil Hugenholtz

Content Tagged "Phil Hugenholtz"

April 19, 2013

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]

August 3, 2012

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]

July 27, 2012

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]

February 18, 2012

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]

September 10, 2011

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]

March 13, 2011

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]

December 1, 2010

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]

September 28, 2009

“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]

July 14, 2009

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]

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