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Confirming Microbial Lineages Through Cultivation-Independent Means

Collaborative work culminates in evidence of a single candidate bacterial phylum. The number of microbes found on Earth has been compared to the number of stars in the Milky Way. Yet the proportion of those microbes that can actually be grown under laboratory conditions is so small it would be akin to those stars that… [Read More]

Collaborator Janet Jansson in Quanta magazine

“[S]oon after the turn of the century, new high-octane DNA sequencing methods made it possible to sequence thousands or even millions of genes almost instantly. These new, speedier methods meant researchers could easily sequence the collective genomes of the sample, known as a metagenome, for the first time. Suddenly, it was possible to scan the… [Read More]

Automating Microbial Genome Sequence Decontamination

Single cell genomics and metagenomics are pioneering techniques that have helped researchers assess environmental microbial community structure and function. As projects applying these techniques scale up, however, researchers are hindered by the lack of a high-throughput process to review assembled genome sequences. Currently, sequence decontamination of the microbial genomes being uploaded to public databases is… [Read More]

Promoting Safety & Wellness at Work and at Home

Marking its 9th year, the annual JGI Safety and Wellness Fair took place on Wednesday, June 3, 2015, drawing around 120 attendees to our Courtyard. Over a dozen booths promoted various aspects of health and safety, both at work and at home. The JGI Safety & Wellness (SWELL) Team, a group of employees who have… [Read More]

Meraculous: Genome Assembly from Months to Minutes

“Using the parallelized version of Meraculous, we can now assemble the entire human genome in about eight minutes using 15,360 computer processor cores. With this tool, we estimate that the output from the world’s biomedical sequencing capacity could be assembled using just a portion of NERSC’s Edison supercomputer,” says Evangelos Georganas, a UC Berkeley graduate… [Read More]

The Most Complete Functional Map of an Entire Enzyme Family

DOE-funded researchers develop a new process for annotating cellulose-degrading enzymes. The Science: Researchers at two Department of Energy-funded Scientific User Facilities collaborated with one of three Bioenergy Research Centers to develop and analyze high-resolution crystal structures of an enzyme from the cellulose-degrading GH55 family. They then went further and were able to apply a variety… [Read More]

Understanding the [Non-Coding] Spaces Between

DOE JGI researchers sequenced and analyzed a cyanobacterium with known nitrogen-fixing capabilities. The Science: Researchers sequenced and analyzed the uncommonly large genome of a nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterial strain, comparing it to the more than 150 extant cyanobacterial genomes. The Impact: Unlike many of the existing cyanobacterial genome sequences, the genome of Trichodesmium erythaeum IMS 101 is… [Read More]

Launching the JGI Diversity & Inclusion Initiative

On April 3, 2015, JGI and Genomics Division supervisors took part in a half-day retreat on diversity & inclusion. “About 50 supervisors from Genomics and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) gathered earlier this month at the retreat for talks and discussions on implicit biases, what an inclusive workplace looks like, how to implement processes in recruiting… [Read More]