EGSB News

Nearly 20 years ago in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., genome data producers and data users came to an accord on the use of genome sequencing data released to the public domain. In particular, they agreed that the data was freely available for use and access by the scientific community before those data are used for publication. The Fort Lauderdale Agreement did not include defined policies on data usage, and has led to years of debate, such as whether or not there was a tacit acknowledgement that data generators would have the right of first publication on the data they produced and freely shared.

In a policy paper published January 25, 2019 in Science, 50 coauthors, with 54 unique affiliations from 18 countries, call for a “clear policy that protects public data from restrictions.” The international consortium includes Nikos Kyrpides of the Biosciences Area’s Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology (EGSB) Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Dual barcoded shotgun expression library sequencing, or Dub-seq, is a novel high-throughput method for discovering gene function in microbes under various environmental conditions. It was developed by scientists in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division under the aegis of the Ecosystems and Networks Integrated with Genes and Molecular Assemblies (ENIGMA) program. In a seminal paper published January 18 in Nature Communications, the Dub-seq team presented details of the technique and proof-of-concept work showing that the approach is reproducible, economical, scalable, and identifies both known and novel gene functions.

A team of researchers led by Cheryl Kerfeld, faculty affiliate in the Environmental Genomics & Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, have developed a new method to manipulate miniature factories found in bacteria that could someday lead to new medical, industrial, or energy applications. The factories, called bacterial microcompartments – or BMCs – are found in bacteria all over the world.

Two scientists from the Biosciences Area, Sung-Hou Kim and Susannah Tringe, have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). They join fellow Lab scientists Allen Goldsten, faculty scientist in the Energy Technologies Area, and Kathy Yelick, associate laboratory director of Computing Sciences, in receiving the distinction of Fellow this year for “their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.”

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.