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32 papers in one day – ENCODE project’s first reports

The papers published Wednesday recount more than 1,600 experiments involving more than 180 different cell types, said Richard Myers, president of the nonprofit HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Ala.“They have shown how the millions of switches in the human genome determine which proteins in the body are going to be made, how they will work together, and how… [Read More]

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]

Arabidopsis root microbiome project in GenomeWeb Daily News

“In the same way that microbes play critical roles in and around our own bodies, we are adopting this concept of host-associated metagenomics in plant genomics as well, as it will ultimately lead to predictive interventions that will increase plant health and productivity, disease resistance, and carbon capture,” co-author Susannah Tringe, who heads the metagenome… [Read More]

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]

Fungal genomics and coal formation in The Green Optimistic

White rot fungi from the class of fungi known as Agaricomycetes are capable of degrading the polymer lignin. Lignin is found in plant tissues and is largely responsible for the rigid structure of plant cell walls. The researchers postulated that fungal degradation of lignin caused plant matter to be broken down into its basic components and… [Read More]

Fungal genomics and coal formation in Clean Technica

In an ironic twist, genomics researchers have stumbled upon an incredible discovery – the same ancestral fungus that ended coal formation millennia ago may now be able to boost biofuel and bioenergy production. Read more at Clean Technica [Read More]

Fungal genomics and coal formation in BioBased Digest

In Massachusetts, a group of 70 researchers led by David S. Hibbett of Clark University, in Worcester, Mass. and Igor V. Grigoriev of the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute comparing the genomes of 31 fungi to determine how white rot fungi breaks down lignin and could be a major breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol technology. Read… [Read More]

White rot fungal genomics for biopulping in Biomass Magazine

Something special is happening with a research project focused on two white rot fungi genomes. Led by the U.S. DOE’s Joint Genome Institute, a team of international researchers is collaborating on a project to sequence and analyze the fungi strains to understand how enzymes present in the fungi break down plant biomass. It’s not the research… [Read More]

On white rot, coal and biofuels in ClimateWire

The evolutionary rise of a common fungus — white rot — is responsible for the end of underground coal formation 60 million years ago, scientists say in a paper published last week in Science.Ironically, that same fungus could now be a key element to help the world move away from fossil fuels by helping to create… [Read More]

Linking white rot fungi and the Carboniferous period in Scientific American

Now a new genomic analysis suggests why Earth significantly slowed its coal-making processes roughly 300 million years ago—mushrooms evolved the ability to break down lignin. “These white rot fungi are major decomposers of wood and the only organism that achieves substantial degradation of lignin,” explains mycologist David Hibbett of Clark University in Massachusetts, who led the research… [Read More]