News

In PNAS, a research team led by Sabeeha Merchant at UC Berkeley has found numerous examples of polycistronic expression – in which two or more genes are encoded on a single molecule of mRNA – in two species of green algae. Go here to watch a video about the work.

Two Biosciences Area researchers—Natalia Ivanova and Susannah Tringe—are among 65 new Fellows elected into the American Academy of Microbiology’s 2021 class. An honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, the mission of the Academy is to provide microbiological expertise in the service of science and the public. Fellows are elected annually through a highly-selective peer-review process based on their records of scientific achievement and contributions in the field of microbiology.

In Nature, a team led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, and DOE Joint Genome Institute  has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome. Building off this work, researchers at all four DOE Bioenergy Research Centers—the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, the Center for … Read more »

The Department of Energy has announced that eight distinguished scientists and engineers will receive the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of DOE’s highest honors. Named after Berkeley Lab’s founder, the award was established in 1959 and recognizes mid-career researchers for exceptional contributions supporting the DOE and its mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States.

Assembling viral genomes from metagenomes is challenging and often results in highly fragmented data, which limits the ability of researchers to accurately perform functional assessment, host prediction, and phylogenetic analysis. As reported in Nature Biotechnology, a team including JGI’s Stephen Nayfach, Frederik Schulz, Emiley Eloe-Fadrosh, Simon Roux and Nikos Kyrpides developed an automated tool called CheckV (pronounced “Check-Vee”) to help researchers assess and improve the quality of metagenome-assembled viral genomes. CheckV has already been applied to over 2.4 million viral genomes available in the latest release of IMG/VR, a database that is part of the Integrated Microbial Genomes & Microbiomes (IMG/M) suite. Learn more here on the JGI website.