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Mobile genetic elements (MGEs) are genetic entities that seek to replicate themselves and spread from cell to cell. Two of the most common forms of MGEs are viruses and plasmids. They can be found in virtually all of Earth’s ecosystems. A software tool recently described in Nature Biotechnology called geNomad identifies and classifies MGEs based upon their gene content and their genetic sequences. The software was created by researchers under the direction of JGI Microbiome Data Science Group Lead Nikos Kyrpides.

Two scientists in the Area, Greg Hura and Vivek Mutalik, are heading up research projects that are part of the Department of Energy’s Biopreparedness Research Virtual Environment (BRaVE) initiative. Yasuo Yoshikuni, a scientist at the Joint Genome Institute, is part of a third project that is being led by Brookhaven National Laboratory. These projects will leverage bioimaging expertise to develop better therapies and vaccines for viruses, develop a high-throughput platform to rapidly design countermeasures to drug-resistant pathogens, and unlock the molecular basis of plant-pathogen interactions to create resilient bioenergy crops.

To provide broad plant genomic capabilities, the DOE Joint Genome Institute works in partnership with the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, which specializes in genome improvement for plants. As part of that partnership, the JGI and HudsonAlpha researchers led a team that recently published work on the JGI Plant Gene Atlas in Nucleic Acids Research. Learn more on the JGI website.

In the summer of 2015, Adam Session was a postdoc working at the DOE Joint Genome Institute with Dan Rokhsar, who also holds a joint appointment with the University of California, Berkeley. Nowadays, Session is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University in New York. He and Rokhsar have recently published a Nature Communications paper that builds off their early collaborations that could help crop breeders and researchers predict how crops and model organisms may evolve.

To do anything, viruses must find a host, and not just any host will do. It must be a specific host the virus has adapted to commandeer. For bacteriophage viruses, these hosts are microbes like bacteria, not humans. With metagenomic sequencing, researchers have found more of these viruses than ever before, in all kinds of ecosystems. However, matching these viral genetic sequences to their hosts is crucial to understanding what these viruses can do. Building on existing virus-host prediction approaches, researchers have created a new program called iPHoP (pronounced “eye-pop”, freely available online).