News

The undeniable power of plants, and the lessons they can teach us, are why the JGI took on the Open Green Genome Initiative in 2018 as part of its Community Science Program. A recent paper published in Nature Communications on Ceratopteris richardii marks the first published manuscript of a genome sequence generated through the OGG and solves an ongoing mystery in ferns.

Each year, the Berkeley Lab Director’s Achievement Award program recognizes outstanding contributions by employees to all facets of Lab activities. Several Biosciences Area personnel are among the 2022 honorees.

Within a forest’s soil, a microbiome of bacteria, viruses and fungi process carbon and nitrogen, paving the way for future plants and trees to grow. However, fire changes the microbes within the soil. Recently, JGI collaborators worked to understand which microbes in the soil persist after a wildfire — and why they thrive. Their results appear in Nature Microbiology.

Aparajitha Srinivasan placed third and Ying Wang was awarded People’s Choice in the Berkeley Lab Research SLAM competition on September 22. Srinivasan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in the Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division, detailed her research on utilizing computational modeling to select the best routes to creating aroma additives. The Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division’s Wang covered how to determine which microbes eat which carbon molecules.

In the journal Cell, scientists from a team led by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, and the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) describe a computational pipeline that can specifically scan for RNA virus sequences.