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DOE JGI Genomics of Energy and Environment Meeting coverage by GenomeWeb

Purdue University’s Jody Banks kicked off the scientific sessions at the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute’s 7th annual User Meeting in Walnut Creek, Calif., this week with her talk on the Selaginella genome and how sequencing diverse species could help researchers understand plant evolution. Read more at GenomeWeb [Read More]

Bioinformatics challenges for metagenomic analyses

There are more microbes in, on and around the planet than there are stars in the sky. However, the vast majority of these microorganisms have not yet been studied, in part because many of them do not thrive when moved out of their natural environment. A spoonful of soil contains a complex and diverse microbial… [Read More]

Elucidating bacteria’s roles in ant fungal gardens

Leafcutter ants cultivate fungal gardens that serve as their primary food source. Working toward the goal of harnessing novel enzymes for breaking down plant biomass to produce cellulosic biofuels, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) researchers have been studying the process by which the fungi break down the plant leaves harvested by the ants and… [Read More]

Analyzing enzymes for a PAH degradation pathway

Microbial activity is crucial for breaking down compounds, removing pollutants and chemically transforming organic compounds. Some of these pollutants are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) found in contaminated soils. The PAH phenanthrene, for example, can be broken down by the bacterium Arthobacterphenanthrenivorans, which was isolated from a creosote-polluted site in Greece, and used by the microbe… [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]

2013 federal budget proposal in GenomeWeb Daily News

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds the Joint Genome Institute and other biology research aimed at developing better renewable biofuels and energy-related technologies, would receive $5 billion, compared to $4.9 billion this fiscal year. Read the full GenomeWeb News story on the Obama administration’s 2013 budget proposal. [Read More]

A new approach for improve genome assembly

Assembling a genome from fragments of DNA sequence is often compared to assembling a puzzle. One of the problems researchers face with the increasing use of next-generation sequencing technologies is that the pieces of DNA sequence generated by the 454 or Illumina platforms are much smaller and far more numerous than those produced by the… [Read More]

The role of hydrophobins in plant-fungal mutualism

To get an idea of the importance of mutualistic relationships between plants and fungi, consider that a third of the carbon sequestered in the soil of boreal forests are composed of the wood residues after the fungi break down the cellulose. Maintaining the interface between the fungi and their hosts is the job of small… [Read More]

Permafrost study referenced in ScienceNews

In Nature in December, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., and colleagues reported one such microbe’s draft genome — put together from DNA acquired from the semifrozen dirt in an Alaskan black spruce forest. The Alaskan microbe carries genes tuned to transform organic matter into methane, a finding that… [Read More]

A toolkit for T. reesei

The availability of an organism’s genome sequence is useful for improving downstream applications such as large-scale biofuel production, but it is only the first step on this path. In the case of the fungus Trichoderma reesei, whose genome sequence was published by the DOE JGI in 2008, the cellulases in T. reesei have multiple industrial… [Read More]