EGSB News

Two Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) scientists recently joined colleagues from the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area to share their expertise with the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Science Advisory Panel. They briefed the panel on their research related to enhancing plant-microbe interactions for improved plant yields and to increasing the efficiency of genome editing tool CRISPR in plants. Read more from Earth & Environmental Sciences.

Jenny Mortimer, Deputy Vice President of the Feedstocks Division at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Scientist with the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, participated at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2017 Annual Meeting of the New Champions alongside business and political leaders. The annual meeting whose overall theme this year was inclusive growth in the fourth industrial revolution took place from June 27-29 in Dalian, China. At the meeting Mortimer participated at a press conference entitled “Young, talented and fighting for science” which can be viewed here.

N. Louise Glass, director of the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, is being named a fellow of the Mycological Society of America (MSA) at their annual meeting being held this week in Athens, GA. MSA Fellows recognize mid-career members and also MSA volunteers. Glass is being honored as an outstanding mycologist who has served the MSA in several capacities, including as a member of both the Society’s leadership body and the Editorial Board of Mycologia, the official journal of the MSA. Read more in the MSA meeting announcement.

Using a genetic mouse model developed at Berkeley Lab with CRISPR/Cas9 editing technology, University of California, Davis, researchers led by Alexander Nord have examined the developmental impact of a specific mutation found in some rare cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The project began while Nord—now an assistant professor with the Center for Neuroscience at UC Davis—was a postdoc in the Mammalian Functional Genomics Laboratory of Berkeley Lab co-authors Axel Visel, Len Pennacchio, and Diane Dickel. In a paper published June 26 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers report that mice with a loss-of-function mutation in one copy of the CHD8 gene have increased brain volume and cognitive impairment, similar to that seen in people with the same mutation. CHD8 encodes a protein responsible for packaging DNA in cells, which in turn controls gene expression during development. Read more from UC Davis.

Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and Biosciences Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) division researchers have released 1,003 reference genomes for diverse bacteria and archea isolated from environments ranging from sea water and soil, to plants, and to cow rumen and termite guts. The release is the largest to date from JGI’s Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) initiative, which seeks to fill in unexplored branches of the tree of microbial life. JGI’s Supratim Mukherjee and Rekha Seshadri were co-first authors on the paper published in Nature Biotechnology; senior author Nikos Kyrpides and co-authors Natalia Ivanova, Axel Visel, Tanja Woyke, and Yasuo Yoshikuni have secondary affiliations with EGSB. The genomes are publicly available through the Integrated Microbial Genomes with Microbiomes (IMG/M) system. Read more on the JGI website.