On May 11, 2017, NASA astronaut and microbiologist Kate Rubins, the first woman to sequence DNA in space, gave a talk about “Science in Extreme Environments” at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Among the anecdotes she shared about living and working in space for nearly 4 months was one on how mundane bench tasks… [Read More]

With the topic “Doing Science in Space: At 17,500 miles per hour and 250 miles up,” NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins will be speaking at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on Thursday, May 11, 2017. A livestream of the talk will be available for Berkeley Lab staff here. This visit is co-hosted by the Molecular Foundry and the… [Read More]

On January 31 at Berkeley Lab, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB) that will be the home of DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and DOE Systems Knowledgebase (KBase) in 2019. Flanked by dignitaries representing the Berkeley Lab, the Department of Energy Office of Science, and the University of California, incoming… [Read More]

“Using the single-celled sequencing techniques that she had perfected at the Joint Genome Institute, Woyke and her colleagues ended up with exactly 201 genomes from these candidate phyla, representing 29 branches on the tree of life that scientists knew nothing about. ‘For many phyla, this was the first genomic data anyone had seen,’ she says.”… [Read More]

“Eelgrass (Zostera marina) is an unlikely model for plant evolution, but is a useful one because it has undergone major habitat shifts: it evolved from marine algae into a terrestrial flowering plant, then moved back to the sea again.” Among the 10 papers that were included the Editors’ Choice list of the Nature journal is the… [Read More]

“Microbiologists often seek life in the planet’s extremes — from below ice sheets to within geysers. But Appalachian Basin scientists found hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, also provides its own inhabited extremes in their backyard.” In Discover magazine’s list of top 100 science stories of 2016 is a study from The Ohio State University researchers that led… [Read More]

Six of the DOE JGI’s researchers are among the most highly cited in the world. That’s according to the annual list compiled by Clarivate Analytics, formerly the IP & Science arm of Thomson Reuters. (Click here to see the full list.) The 2016 list focused on Highly Cited Papers (defined in the Methodology section as… [Read More]

At the recently concluded supercomputing conference (SC16), students from the University of Science and Technology of China, who went by “Team SwanGeese,” won the Student Cluster Competition. (Click here to read the SC16 story about the winners.) One of the team’s advisers was JGI’s Zhong Wang, head of the Genome Analysis group. Zhong was tapped to participate by… [Read More]

Kaushal Sharma, one of five Antioch High School rising juniors who participated in internships at the DOE Joint Genome Institute this summer through the Biotech Partners program is now an author on a Nucleic Acids Research publication. The paper describes the version 6 data updates and feature enhancements to the Genomes OnLine Database (GOLD) administered… [Read More]

On Wednesday, October 12 at 10am Pacific time, PLOS is hosting a #SciWed redditAMA related to a recent Plos Genetics paper on a fungus that severely impacts banana crop yields. Igor Grigoriev, DOE JGI’s Fungal Genomics head, is participating, along with DOE JGI collaborators Steve Goodwin at USDA-ARS and Gert Kema at Wageningen University. Check out… [Read More]