Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created a stripped-down life form, with a minimal number of genes needed to keep it going. They hope to use it as a platform to create designer life forms, and say it’s already taught some important, and humbling, lessons about the essence of life. Berkeley Lab’s Adam Arkin, Interim Biosciences Deputy for Science, and Samuel Deutsch, DOE Joint Genome Institute, comment on the research in this NBC News story.
DOE JGI Helps Prove Genetic Code’s Flexibility
“Our approach provides new evidence of a limited but unequivocal plasticity of the genetic code whose secrets still lie hidden in the majority of unsequenced organisms.”
Published ahead online March 16, 2016 in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Ed., researchers from the DOE Joint Genome Institute and Yale University have discovered that microorganisms recognize more than one codon for the rare, genetically encoded amino acid selenocysteine. The finding adds credence to recent studies indicating that an organism’s genetic vocabulary is not as constrained as had been long held. Read more about this study on the DOE JGI website.
DOE JGI Director to Step Down, Assume Scientific Helm of Startup
“I started out my career in medicine. Now that the Institute is running on all its scientific cylinders as a state of the art DOE Office of Science Genomic User Facility, I plan to return to these roots and focus my attention on addressing an important problem in human health.”
After 14 years guiding the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute from completing DOE’s contributions to the Human Genome Project to transitioning the Institute into a National User Facility enabling the science of thousands of researchers focused on energy and environmental problems, DOE JGI Director Eddy Rubin announced on March 10, 2016 that he will be stepping down later this year.
Once a successor is found and brought onboard, Rubin will move to a position as Chief Scientific Officer for San Francisco-based startup Metabiota, a big data analytics company focused on infectious diseases and epidemic risk. Read more about Rubin’s announcement on the DOE JGI website.
Biosciences Area FY16 LDRD Projects
The projects of eleven Biosciences Area scientists and engineers received funding through the FY2016 Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. These projects cover a broad range of topics, including energy science technology applications, novel computing technologies, and mechanistic understanding of multi-scale interactions among molecules, microbes, plants, metazoans, the abiotic environment, and their feedbacks. Together, these efforts account for nearly 14% of the $25.3 million allocated. Lab-wide, 84 proposals were selected from a field of 179.
DOE JGI User Facility Partnership Yields Gut Fungi Study
“Nature has engineered these fungi to have what seems to be the world’s largest repertoire of enzymes that break down biomass.”
Published online February 18, 2016, in Science, a team from UC Santa Barbara drew upon two U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (SC) User Facilities: the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the DOE Joint Genome Institute to show that anaerobic fungi found in the guts of goats, horses and sheep are just as capable of breaking down plant biomass as are industry-developed fungi, potentially leading to cheaper biofuels and bio-based products. The team’s study is the first to result from a partnership between the two national user facilities called Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science or FICUS. The partnership allows scientists around the world to draw on capabilities at both SC user facilities to get a more complete understanding of fundamental scientific questions. Read more about the FICUS project on the JGI website.
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