Kasey Markel and Patrick Shih (UC Berkeley and the Joint BioEnergy Institute) are looking for new ways to engineer plants. So they’ve looked into wasps that program oak trees to raise their young in structures called galls. In this episode, hear from Kasey and Patrick about how this project unfolded, and how they worked with the JGI’s metabolomics program to find out more about these weird little pods. [Read More]

To engineer yeast to do more, and understand genomes in general, Jef Boeke, Weimin Zhang (NYU Langone Health) and Leslie Mitchell (Neochromosome) have worked to replace yeast’s native chromosomes with synthetic versions. This project has turned out to be an international collaboration, with some artistic endeavors along the way. Eventually, the goal is to create an entirely human-generated yeast genome. [Read More]

Three stories of JGI-supported research, connected to nutrient cycles. Francis Martin and Lucas Auer discuss their work on the community of forest floor fungi. Allison Joy looks into seagrass meadows’ carbon sequestration with insights from Adam Healey and Xiao Ma. And Karen Serrano and Benjamin Cole explain their research on the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots. [Read More]

This is the third and final episode of our series on a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. This episode is a look at how researchers get these specialized snapshots of a freshwater ecosystem. [Read More]

This series is the story of a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin’s Lake Mendota. In this episode: a look at the supercomputing that stitches together large datasets with the assembler program MetaHipMer2. Oak Ridge National Lab is home to two supercomputers — Summit and Frontier — that process terabytes of data with MetaHipMer2. But nearby the JGI, a cluster called Dori is also capable of running smaller MetaHipMer assemblies — so we head there for a sense of what this supercomputing looks like. [Read More]

Lake Mendota sits right next to the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And Trina McMahon’s lab has been sampling the microbes of that lake for over 20 years, to understand how the freshwater ecosystem works. So a few years ago, when they set out to analyze 500 metagenomes, it was the biggest project the JGI had ever put together. The next 3 episodes are the story behind that giant assembly from Lake Mendota. In this episode: the software evolution that made metagenome assemblies like this possible. [Read More]

To set up flexible, repeatable experiments on plants and microbes, Trent Northen’s group at Berkeley Lab created a fabricated ecosystem – an EcoFAB. These small plastic growth chambers let researchers around the world compare their work consistently. And EcoFABs also work well in the classroom. This episode, we visit Los Medanos College to see EcoFabs in action in Jill Bouchard’s BIO 21 lab course. [Read More]

Meet researchers who have hiked, rafted and met local wildlife (a marmot!) as they’ve sampled the microbial communities living in the mountaintop lakes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. These lakes are isolated, but varied. They’re a great way to see how climate change affects freshwater ecosystems, and how those ecosystems work. [Read More]

Right now, our natural rubber comes from just one tree species: Hevea brasiliensis. It’s great at producing latex that becomes rubber, but it’s vulnerable to disease and climate shifts. So researchers are looking into a desert shrub that’s native to North America: guayule. [Read More]