Biosciences Area

JGI Researchers Trace Strawberry Ancestors For a View of Crop Evolution

In the summer of 2015, Adam Session was a postdoc working at the DOE Joint Genome Institute with Dan Rokhsar, who also holds a joint appointment with the University of California, Berkeley. Nowadays, Session is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University in New York. He and Rokhsar have recently published a Nature Communications paper that builds off their early collaborations that could help crop breeders and researchers predict how crops and model organisms may evolve.

JGI Creates a New Matchmaker for Phages and their Hosts

To do anything, viruses must find a host, and not just any host will do. It must be a specific host the virus has adapted to commandeer. For bacteriophage viruses, these hosts are microbes like bacteria, not humans. With metagenomic sequencing, researchers have found more of these viruses than ever before, in all kinds of ecosystems. However, matching these viral genetic sequences to their hosts is crucial to understanding what these viruses can do. Building on existing virus-host prediction approaches, researchers have created a new program called iPHoP (pronounced “eye-pop”, freely available online).

JGI Users Shed Light on Diversity in the Deep Sea

JGI users studied microbial communities at hydrothermal vents and underwater volcanoes. They found a wealth of diversity in the microorganisms there, which could lead to the development of new biotechnologies around clean energy, biofuels and bioproducts.

Was this page useful?

Send
like not like
Follow us: