Directed production of wood-degrading enzymes begins away from the gut The sight of termites anywhere near one’s house is enough to raise a homeowner’s concerns about the potential damage these insects might inflict. Shipbuilders and engineers have similar feelings about shipworms, worm-like wood-eating marine clams that have also been called the “termites of the sea.”… [Read More]

Advancing New Tools to Fill in the Microbial Tree of Life To paraphrase a famous passage from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: microbes, microbes everywhere, though most we do not know. This is changing, though. In a perspective piece published November 6 in the journal Science, Eddy Rubin, Director of the U.S. Department… [Read More]

The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science user facility, has announced that 32 new projects have been selected for the 2015 Community Science Program (CSP). From sampling Antarctic lakes to Caribbean waters, and from plant root micro-ecosystems, to the subsurface underneath the water table in forested watersheds,… [Read More]

For multicellular life—plants and animals—to thrive in the oceans, there must be enough dissolved oxygen in the water. In certain coastal areas, extreme oxygen-starvation produces “dead zones” that decimate marine fisheries and destroy food web structure. As dissolved oxygen levels decline, energy is increasingly diverted away from multicellular life into microbial community metabolism resulting in… [Read More]

Combining complementary resources for greater scientific understanding. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) have accepted 12 projects submitted during the 2014 call for Collaborative Science Initiative proposals. The collaborative call represents a unique opportunity for researchers to combine the power of genomics and molecular characterization in… [Read More]

Tagging strategy allows for population surveys The sheer volume of cyanobacteria in the oceans makes them major players in the global carbon cycle and responsible for as much as a third of the carbon fixed. These photosynthetic microbes, which include Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus, are tiny – as many as 100 million cells can be found… [Read More]

One of the most basic rules for playing the game “Twenty Questions” is that all of the questions must be definitively answered by either “yes” or “no.” The exchange of information allows the players to correctly guess the item in question. Fungal researchers have been using a variation of Twenty Questions to determine if wood-decaying… [Read More]

“Increased to levels unprecedented” is how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) described the rise of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions in their report on the physical science basis of climate change in 2013.  According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the atmospheric concentration of methane, a greenhouse gas some 28… [Read More]

From antiseptic oils to the construction of didgeridoos, the traditional Australian Aboriginal wind instrument, the eucalyptus tree serves myriad purposes, accounting for its status as one of the world’s most widely planted hardwood trees. Its prodigious growth habit has caught the eyes of researchers seeking to harness and improve upon Eucalyptus’ potential for enhancing sustainable… [Read More]