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Content Tagged "microbial genomics"

Permafrost soil metagenome study in Gizmodo

A team of researchers from Berkeley took chunks of permafrost soil from Alaska, and shipped them back to the lab to thaw them out in controlled conditions. As they woke up, the gassy little microorganisms trapped in the melting ice spewed out more methane than the contestants in a bean-eating competition. Read more in Gizmodo [Read More]

Permafrost soil metagenome study on LiveScience

“Nobody has looked at what happens to microbes when the permafrost thaws,” said Janet Jansson, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. She led a study that recorded what happened when chunks of Alaskan permafrost thawed for the first time in 1,200 years. Read more on LiveScience [Read More]

Permafrost soil metagenome study in GenomeWeb

“Currently in climate models, it’s not really taken into account adequately what the microorganisms are doing,” senior author Janet Jansson, a researcher affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, told GenomeWeb Daily News. “The hope is to get enough information at the microscopic level that we’ll have… [Read More]

A metagenomic approach to analyzing rice endophytes

During the call for 2012 proposals for the DOE JGI’s Community Sequencing Program, one of the areas of focus researchers were asked to consider was that of plant-microbe interactions. Microbes that live in plants or in the rhizosphere where plant roots and soil interact can play crucial roles in plant health. This is of particular… [Read More]

UV treatments for contaminated MDA reagents

  Single cell genomicsis a method used by researchers to get around the research roadblock thrown up by the need for large amounts of microbial DNA in order to do traditional sequencing techniques. In this process, a single cell isolated from an environmental sample is amplified to make millions of copies of the microbial genome… [Read More]

Of Soil Carbon and Climate Change

Thanks to genome sequencing techniques such as those at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, we now have a much better idea of what microbes are in soil, what they’re doing, and what proteins they’re producing. That’s important, because a handful of soil can teem with millions of microbes, some… [Read More]

Soil biocrust microbial genome

One of the DOE JGI’s 2011 Community Sequencing Program projects involves studying biological soil crusts to understand their role in the global carbon cycle. Found in arid lands which make up nearly half of the planet’s total land mass, communities of lichens, mosses and cyanobacteria use soil particles to form biocrusts less than half an… [Read More]

Ethanol Contaminant Could Assist Production Efficiency

An Ethanol plant in Bairstown, Iowa (Courtesy of USDA) In the August edition of The Journal of Bacteriology, researchers led by long-time collaborator David Mills of the University of California Davis, and including DOE JGI’s Alex Copeland, Olga Chertkov and Lynne Goodwin, announced the completed genome sequence of Lactobacillus buchneri and has now been made… [Read More]

Efficiency Improvements in Biofuels Production

To overcome the difficulties of converting cellulosic biomass into high energy-content fuel, researchers have been seeking to improve various stages of the process. One big obstacle that stands in the way is that most enzymes are inefficient at breaking down biomass when in the presence of ionic liquids, solvents that have proven effective at treating the… [Read More]