Biosciences Area

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.

DOE JGI Debuts Animation about National User Facilities

Go team science! A new animation from the DOE JGI demonstrates how the DOE Joint Genome Institute, NERSC and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) – all national user facilities at Berkeley Lab and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science – work together, underpinning our critical research infrastructure to advance the frontiers of science, decode the Earth’s DNA, and improve our understanding of the world. Watch the video at bit.ly/UFvideoJGI on the DOE JGI Youtube channel.

First Marine Angiosperm Genome Sequence

Coastal seagrass ecosystems cover some 200,000 square kilometers. They account for an estimated 15 percent of carbon fixed in global ocean, and also impact sulfur and nitrogen cycles.As a foundational species in the coastal marine ecosystem, researchers are interested in understanding how the plant—and by extension other plants in the ecosystem—adapts to climate change. Published online January 27, 2016 in Nature – and as the cover of the journal’s February 18, 2016 issue – a European team including researchers from the DOE Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) sequenced a seagrass genome: that of the eelgrass Zostera marina, taken from the Archipelago Sea off Finland.  Read more on the JGI website.

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