With help from two DOE national user facilities – JGI and the Environmental Molecular Sciences – a team at the University of British Columbia has developed a math model that could help researchers and policy makers track the impact of climate change on the microbial networks that drive the world’s marine ecosystems. The model couples omic information and biogeochemical data from the Saanich Inlet ecosystem in British Columbia, Canada, which has long been used as an analog for studying oxygen minimum zones. Read more about the impact of this work, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, here.
How Fungi Help Trees Tolerate Drought
The mutualistic relationship between tree roots and ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi has been shaping forest ecosystems since their inception. ECM fungi are key players supporting the growth, health and stress tolerance of forest trees globally, and help boost the productivity of bioenergy feedstock trees. To learn more about what characteristics are dominant in the most common ECM fungus Cenococcum geophilum, a team including researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) compared its genome with the genomes of two close relatives, neither of which are ECM fungi. They found specific adaptations in the Cenococcum genome that could help their hosts be more resistant to drought stress, a finding that could be useful in developing more plant feedstocks for bioenergy amidst the changing climate. The study was published date September 2 in Nature Communications. Read more at JGI News.
Biotech Partners High School Students Intern in Biosciences Area
The Biosciences Area partnered with Biotech Partners (BP) this summer by providing internships to 13 high school students. The mission of the non-profit Biotech Partners is to educate underserved youth in the Bay Area with personal, academic and professional development experiences that increase participation in higher education and access to fulfilling science careers. The Biotech … Read more »
DOE JGI Team Unveils Earth’s Viral Diversity
“We have increased the number of viral sequences by 50x, and 99 percent of the virus families identified are not closely related to any previously sequenced virus. This provides an enormous amount of new data that would be studied in more detail in the years to come. We have more than doubled the number of microbial phyla that serve as hosts to viruses, and have created the first global viral distribution map. The amount of analysis and discoveries that we anticipate will follow this dataset cannot be overstated.”
Although the number of viruses is estimated to be at least two orders of magnitude more than the microbial cells on the planet, there are currently less than 2,200 sequenced DNA virus genomes, compared to the approximately 50,000 bacterial genomes, in sequence databases. In a study published online August 17, 2016 in Nature, DOE JGI researchers utilized the largest collection of assembled metagenomic datasets from around the world to uncover over 125,000 partial and complete viral genomes, the majority of them infecting microbes. This single effort increases the number of known viral genes by a factor of 16, and provides researchers with a unique resource of viral sequence information. Read more on the DOE JGI website.
DOE JGI Team Expands Workhorse Yeasts Diversity
“Obtaining a complete genome of a microbe that is industrially important greatly stimulates research in the area…. We can expect an explosive interest in yeast biology in the coming years.”
To help boost the use of a wider range of yeasts and to explore the use of genes and pathways encoded in their genomes, a team led by DOE JGI researchers conducted a comparative genomic analysis of 29 yeasts, including 16 whose genomes were newly sequenced and annotated. In the study published the week of August 15, 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team mapped various metabolic pathways to yeast growth profiles. Read more on the DOE JGI website.
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