Biosciences News

An international team led by Justin Reese, a research scientist in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology (EGSB) Division, analyzed electronic health record data aggregated in the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) Data Enclave to assess whether metformin is associated with reduced COVID-19 severity in people with prediabetes or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), two common conditions that increase the risk of severe COVID-19 presentation.

Since its launch 25 years ago, the Genomes OnLine Database has matured from six projects on a spreadsheet into a flagship genomic metadata repository, making curated microbiome metadata that follows community standards freely available, and enabling large-scale comparative genomics analysis initiatives.

In the last thirty years, in environments all over the world, scientists have discovered giants among viruses. Culturing studies have been key to understanding these viruses’ host range, morphological structures, and infection strategies. More recently, researchers have employed cultivation-independent approaches to discover thousands of new giant viruses, rapidly expanding the diversity of the Nucleocytoviricota phylum. A new review provides a perspective on giant virus diversity, and how sequencing and bioinformatics have sped up the study of giant viruses.

Biosciences Area scientist Deepika Awasthi won the 2022 Berkeley Lab Pitch Competition held on October 27. The competition, funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and co-hosted by the Intellectual Property Office and the Haas School of Business, was designed to provide scientist-entrepreneurs at the Lab with experience in pitching to key stakeholders such as potential investors and partners.

In Cell Genomics, an international consortium led by researchers at the Joint Genome Institute team generated 824 new Actinobacteria genomes, which were were combined with nearly 5,000 publicly available ones and 1,100 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) reconstructed from sequenced environmental samples in a previous study.