Several Biosciences Area personnel are among the 2024 recipients of Berkeley Lab Director’s Achievement Awards. The program recognizes outstanding contributions by employees to all aspects of Lab activities.
A Tool to Find Nomadic Genes that Help Microbes Adapt
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.
Biosciences Area FY23 LDRD Projects
The projects of 22 Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY23 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program.
JGI Researchers Provide a Perspective on Giant Virus Diversity
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 Researchers Part of Genomic Analysis of Giant Bacteria Found in Guadeloupe Mangroves
In Science, a team led by Jean-Marie Volland, a scientist with joint appointments at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Laboratory for Research in Complex Systems, and Silvina Gonzalez-Rizzo and Olivier Gros of the Université des Antilles, described the morphological and genomic features of a giant filamentous bacterium, along with its life cycle.
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