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As Joint Genome Institute (JGI) Director Nigel Mouncey and Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division Director Blake Simmons shared in their June 4 emails, Nick Everson will rejoin the JGI as Deputy for Operations starting on July 1. He will succeed Ray Turner, who will retire from Berkeley Lab on June 29.

In Science, a team led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Terrestrial Microbiology and the University of Bordeaux have developed a platform that mimics chloroplast function within a cell-sized system. Photosynthesis harnesses carbon captured from the atmosphere in a process that generates energy. The MPI team led by Tobias Erb, director of the MPI for Terrestrial Microbiology, ultimately aims to develop an artificial photosynthesis pathway that would more efficiently remove carbon from the atmosphere than current natural processes and use it as a sustainable resource for making high-value bioproducts.  The work was enabled in part through an approved JGI’s Community Science Program (CSP) Functional Genomic proposal from the Erb lab. Learn more here on the JGI website.

Shrub willow Salix purpurea is a potential biofuel feedstock of interest to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Understanding the mechanisms by which they reproduce can help guide breeding efforts. However, scientists are still dissecting its sex-linked traits. For the first time, a shrub willow sex chromosome has been sequenced with sufficient resolution to discover that it shares a structure that’s also found in the mammalian Y chromosome.

Read more on the JGI website.

A multi-institutional team including JGI researchers has now sequenced and assembled the genomes of the five major cotton lineages. Senior authors of the paper published April 20, 2020 in Nature Genetics include Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of JGI’s Plant Program, both faculty investigators at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. “The goal has been for all this new cotton work, and even the original cotton project was to try to bring in molecular methods of breeding into cotton,” said Schmutz, who heads JGI’s Plant Program. The high quality reference genomes of all five cotton lineages are available for comparative analysis on JGI’s plant data portal Phytozome 

Go here to read the full story on the JGI website.

Filamentous fungi are like handymen who show up at a job site for a task that requires a flathead screwdriver with a full toolbox including Phillips and specialty screwdrivers, not to mention Allen wrenches. The fungi are similarly armed with a variety of PCWDEs to first break down the components of plant cell walls, which range from simple to complex carbohydrates, and then convert them into simple sugars. When faced with a veritable buffet of carbon sources, these fungi detect which complex chains are available; this information triggers pathways to determine which enzymes should be deployed in what order to most efficiently degrade the plant biomass.