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Lauren Jabusch has been passionate about sustainability and outreach since her early days as a freshman at UC Davis. Nearly a decade later, she has earned a bachelor’s, a master’s, and most recently a doctoral degree in biosystems engineering. Now a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, Jabusch investigates the interactions between soil microbes and plants. She was recently profiled by her Alma Mater, UC Davis College of Engineering.

Two Department of Energy user facilities, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), have selected 12 of the 41 proposals received from a joint call for 2019 research under the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) initiative. This was the sixth FICUS call between EMSL and JGI since the collaborative science initiative was formed in 2014 by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) to harness the combined expertise and resources of two of the national user facilities stewarded by the DOE Office of Science in support of DOE’s energy, environment, and basic research missions. The accepted proposals began on October 1, 2018. Click to read more on the JGI website.

By mining JGI’s massive database of microbial genomes and metagenomes, a team led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab has identified a new family of CRISPR-associated (Cas) enzymes found in an ancient branch of the microbial tree of life. Just one-third the size of the seminal Cas9 protein – the business end of the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 – the new enzymes, dubbed Cas14, are the smallest functional CRISPR system discovered to date. Owing to its compact size and single-stranded DNA cutting activity, Cas14 may improve rapid CRISPR-based diagnostic systems now under development for infectious diseases, genetic mutations, and cancer.

In Nature Genetics, a team led by scientists at the Technical University of Denmark, the JGI, and JBEI present the first large analysis of an Aspergillus fungal subgroup, section Nigri. The results are part of a long-term project to sequence, annotate and analyze the genomes of more than 300 Aspergillus fungi.

In choosing to focus on section Nigri, the researchers recognized the myriad of industrial applications for the fungi within this subgroup. They serve as production organisms for 49 of 260 industrial enzymes and are also very efficient producers of enzymes and secondary metabolites. JGI Fungal Program head Igor Grigoriev said that one of the aims in sequencing the genomes within the Aspergillus genus is to increase the catalog of carbohydrate active enzymes (CAzymes), which can degrade plant cell walls and thus have applications in the DOE mission to develop industrial processes for producing sustainable alternative fuels using candidate bioenergy feedstock crops. Click to read more on the JGI website.

More than a million species of fungi are estimated to live on this planet, but most of that diversity remains unknown because the fungi have avoided detection and have not been cultured for study in laboratories. A team led by researchers at the Joint Genome Institute has developed a pipeline to generate genomes from single cells of uncultivated fungi. The approach was tested on several uncultivated fungal species representing the earliest evolutionary branches in the fungal genealogy that provide a repertoire of important and valuable gene products.