“One of the keys to commercialization of advanced biofuels is the development of cost-competitive ways to extract fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. The use of enzymes from thermophiles—microbes that thrive at extremely high temperatures and alkaline conditions—holds promise for achieving this. Finding the most effective of these microbial enzymes, however, has been a challenge. That… [Read More]

“Sakinaw Lake’s hidden depths have become part of a massive effort to explore some of the least understood branches of the tree of life. “It’s a really interesting place to look for exotic microorganisms,” said Steven Hallam, an environment genomicist at the University of British Columbia.” Read more in The Globe and Mail [Read More]

“Three years ago, Tanja Woyke, a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, and colleagues decided to head into this uncharted territory by applying a newly developed sequencing approach to bacteria and archaea. Until recently, determining a genome’s makeup required many copies of the DNA, and thus only microbes grown in the… [Read More]