Virophage database doubles with discovery in freshwater lakes datasets. In freshwater lakes, microbes regulate the flow of carbon and determine if the bodies of water serve as carbon sinks or carbon sources. Algae and cyanobacteria in particular can trap and use carbon, but their capacity to do so may be impacted by viruses. Viruses exist… [Read More]

Genome analysis of early plant lineage sheds light on how plants learned to thrive on land. Though it’s found around the world, it’s easy to overlook the common liverwort – the plant can fit in the palm of one’s hand and appears to be comprised of flat, overlapping leaves. Despite their unprepossessing appearance, these plants… [Read More]

Community-driven CAMI Challenge offers analysts, scientists insights on the right tools for their research questions. They are everywhere, but invisible to the naked eye. Microbes are the unseen, influential forces behind the regulation of key environmental processes such as the carbon cycle, yet most of them remain unknown. For more than a decade, the U.S…. [Read More]

Proposals encompass multiple capabilities of the national user facility Though organisms can be studied in isolation, a more comprehensive picture emerges when their environmental interactions are taken into account. Along the same lines, many of the 30 proposals selected for the 2018 Community Science Program (CSP) of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE… [Read More]

EMSL and DOE JGI announce FY 2018 FICUS projects Two Department of Energy user facilities, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), have selected 14 proposals from a joint call for 2018 research under the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) initiative. This was the fifth FICUS call between EMSL… [Read More]

Expanding minimum information standards for single-cell genomics, metagenomics datasets. During the Industrial Revolution, factories began relying on machines rather than people for mass production. Amidst the societal changes, standardization crept in, from ensuring nuts and bolts were made identically to maintain production quality, to a standard railroad gauge used on both sides of the Atlantic…. [Read More]

Inaugural Collaborative Science Call Yields Six Proposals Melding Genomics, Supercomputing Six proposals have been selected to participate in a new partnership between two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facilities through the “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) initiative. The expertise and capabilities available at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the National… [Read More]

Potential biotech applications seen with release of 1,003 reference bacterial and archaeal genomes.   The number of microbes in a handful of soil exceeds the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, but researchers know less about what’s on Earth because they have only recently had the tools to deeply explore what is just… [Read More]

Collaborative science initiative enables resolution of fungal protein complexes. One of the biggest barriers in the commercial production of sustainable biofuels is to cost-effectively break down the bioenergy crops into sugars that can then be converted into fuel. To reduce this barrier, bioenergy researchers are looking to nature and the estimated 1.5 million species of… [Read More]

Researchers report prevalent DNA base modification in the earliest fungal lineages Just four letters – A, C, T, and G – make up an organism’s genetic code. Changing a single letter, or base, can lead to changes in protein structures and functions, impacting an organism’s traits. In addition, though, subtler changes can and do happen,… [Read More]