(Left to right): Operations Deputy Ray Turner, Science Deputy Jim Bristow, Metagenome Program head Susannah Tringe, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, and postdoctoral fellow Susie Theroux.
On Friday, February 20, first-year Congressman Mark DeSaulnier, whose 11th District spans from Antioch in east Contra Costa County to Richmond in the west, visited the landmark energy and environmental genomics user facility at his District’s geographic center, the DOE Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek.
The Representative and his staffer Pat Joyce met with senior JGI leadership, including Science Deputy Jim Bristow and Operations Deputy Ray Turner for an overview of JGI’s contributions to characterizing plants, fungi, microbes and consortia of microbes (known as metagenomes) and their relevance to the DOE mission.
Rep. Mark DeSaulnier hears about one of our sequencing platforms with (clockwise) Jim Bristow, Susie Theroux, Susannah Tringe, Ray Turner, and Sequencing Platforms Team Lead Chris Daum.
Then JGI Metagenome Program head Susannah Tringe and postdoctoral fellow Susie Theroux briefed the visitors on a project that has both local and global implications, studying the microbial diversity and carbon cycling in San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River wetlands [download a copy of the JGI wetlands handout for more information].
After their conversation the visitors were led on a tour of JGI’s sequencing platforms by Chris Daum, further reinforcing JGI’s leadership role as a next-generation genome science user facility, as outlined in its “10-Year Strategic Vision.”